Component Plan Language (CoPL) and Component Markup Language (CoML)

Here is a metapha which describes the idea:

The idea of component plans written in CoPL in conjunction with CoML is similar to a prefabricated house, where the customer (application programmer) can influence some details of his new house.

When a customer wants to have a house built, he asks the architect (the generator tool) for the available types of houses (the available plans). After having selected the appropriate type of house, the architect walks through the plan together with the customer and they settle all the design decisions that have not already been fixed by the plan, e.g. the kind of heating, the material for the floor and the windows, etc. Then the architect builds the concrete and final plan of the house (the generator reads the CoPL plan and produces a composition description in XML - i.e. in CoML). Finally, the house (the component ensemble) can be built by a construction company (an IDE tool) and be used (by the end user), but this is completely separated from the building process.

Papers on this topic:

Pease see my publications for more detailed citations

Birngruber Dietrich: A Software Composition Language and Its Implementation in: Bjorner Dines, Broy Manfred, Zamulin Alexandre V. (Eds.): Perspectives of System Informatics (PSI 2001), July 2001, LNCS 2244, Springer, 2001, pp. 519-529. (Full paper)
Birngruber: CoML - Yet Another But Simple Composition Language, ESEC 2001, Vienna, Austria. To be published.
Birngruber, Hof: Interactive Decision Spots for JavaBeans Composition, ECOOP 2000
Birngruber, Hof: Bean Plan, Tools 2000, a predecessor of CoPL, out of date

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