Software product line engineering based on web services

The field of software reuse has evolved from reuse of individual components towards large-scale reuse with software product lines. A software product line (SPL) consists of a family of software systems that have some common functionality and some variable functionality. A family of systems is frequently referred to as a software product line or software product family.; This thesis investigates the technology of web services in the development and customization of software product lines. Web services are defined as a collection of software components that use XML to communicate with other applications over the Internet.; Based on a survey of SPL engineering methods and environments, current approaches do not address the design, development, and automatic customization of software product lines based on web services. It is necessary to extend the current approaches for modeling single web services-based systems to address the unique issues of software product lines.; It is also necessary to introduce an automated development environment that enables developers to develop and automatically customize the web services-based software product line to generate executable target systems.; In order to solve this problem, this research develops a design approach for developing software product lines based on web services. The design approach is based on a multiple-view model for SPL. It addresses the unique issues of engineering a web service-oriented customizable software product line system.; This research also describes three different development approaches to develop the proposed SPL design for automatic customization. The first approach describes the development of a SPL application that can be customized dynamically at run time. The second approach is an extension to the first approach to include separation of concerns between variable source code and kernel source code. The third development approach describes the development of a SPL application that can be customized at source code integration time.; A proof-of-concept software product line engineering environment is developed to support the different development and customization approaches. The SPL engineering environment supports the creation of a SPL model, customization of SPL applications based on each of the development approaches, and establishing separation of concerns and integration between variable source code and kernel source code.