Highlights of the XVCL

XVCL is helpful in any domain, software or non-software, that must be understood, structured and manipulated in terms of its similarities and differences. XVCL explicitly models commonalities and variabilities in software. It is also a variability realization mechanism that is uniformly applied to manage variants in architecture, detail design and code. Its prime application has been to manage variability and changes in programs during software evolution and in reuse via product line approach. With XVCL, we can manage variants across all the software artifacts affected by changes - software architectures, components, models, documentation or test cases.

Parameterization is a prime concept for building generic, reusable and changeable program solutions. XVCL's parameterization mechanism complements and extends mechanisms supported by programming languages and conventional design techniques. XVCL can be applied on top of program solutions written in any programming language, in any application domain. By doing that, both newly developed, well-designed programs and heavily maintained programs can receive extra degrees of changeability, genericity or reusability.

XVCL is best pictured as a generative engine capable of injecting changes, according to pre-defined plans, into programs represented as a hierarchy of highly parameterized meta-components (or templates). Meta-component parameters may be as simple as integer or string values, or as complex as a hierarchy of other meta-components. XVCL uses a "composition with adaptation" mechanism to instantiate parameters and to generate concrete programs from generic meta-component architectures. Many template engines have been proposed to tackle specific problems, in specific domains. XVCL is a language-, problem- and domain-independent template-based generative engine. XVCL is based on a small number of refined constructs underlying fundamental concepts of templates, making it a One-Stop-Solution for problems that require template-based methods.

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