Creating Custom Containers with Generative Techniques

Component containers are a key part of mainstream component technologies, and play an important role in separating nonfunctional concerns from the core component logic. This paper addresses two different aspects of containers. First, it shows how generative programming techniques, using AspectC++ and metaprogramming, can be used to generate stubs and skeletons without the need for special compilers or interface description languages. Second, the paper describes an approach to create custom containers by composing different non-functional features. Unlike component technologies such as EJB, which only support a predefined set of container types, this approach allows different combinations of non-functional features to be composed in a container to meet the application needs.