Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering
Sounds impressive right? I thought so too. Let’s state up front what we are NOT talking about which is a way to visualize fractals like this.
That clarification was for the media acolytes and C-Suite folks who are easily impressed. Moving on….
What we are talking about is an area that I would call at best, cutting edge R&D…..wait for it….that was somewhat popular in obscure French & Swiss academic institutions back in the early 2000’s. This is where the story begins, in 2003.
The OW2 Consortium
I am sure you have heard of them, right? No? I will characterize it as a Euro based open source code research organization. They have a working group called The Fractal Project.
Fractal is a modular, extensible and programming language agnostic component model that can be used to design, implement, deploy and reconfigure systems and applications, from operating systems to middleware platforms and to graphical user interfaces. The goal of Fractal is to reduce the development, deployment and maintenance costs of software systems in general, and of ObjectWeb projects in particular.
Sound familiar? For those of you paying attention to some of the discussions going on about what will replace ERIC, it should. Let me cut to the chase.
The OW2 Consortium working group is dead. The fractal model is dead. It was started in 2003 and has not been updated since 2009. Most of the links for the members are also dead. The few that remain point to Franco-Swiss highly obscure projects and R&D groups.
I won’t linger too much on this topic but if you have a need to study obscure French R&D, I would point you to this paper from 2006.
Mr Stefani would also I am sure appreciate you asking him about his research from 2003 posted here from the world renown National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in France.
There is another “seminal” research paper from 2006 that you can review here related to the OW2 working group.
If you manage to reach Mr Stefani, ask him if the Fractal Component-Based Software model presented on the open source OW2 site is PATENTED or if any TRADEMARKS exist for his work. Maybe the French government would be interested in getting a cut if people are using his research in the states to say, manage voter rolls. LOL.
And with that we move on from OW2.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
If there is any organization that is going to have something to say about Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering, it is the IEEE. Let me cut to the chase.
The IEEE has not published much about this topic. The last paper to be presented was in 2011 here.
Abstract:
Composing large enterprise applications from reusable software components has become a major software development technique. Components are considered as black boxes and are composed together by their provided and required services. In comparison to other software development approaches, this allows for rapid development, clean and explicit architectures, and easy component reuse. Currently, there are several systems that support development and composition of components: service component architecture and Fractal are two well-known ones. At first sight, both have the same goals and provide very similar means to developers. In this paper, we briefly present both systems and then we focus on an in-depth comparison and evaluation of them.
Go back and read that again….look for the word DATABASE. Did you find it?
OK, let’s try one more from 2011 here.
Abstract:
The interoperability of Web services has resulted in its adoption for recently-emerging cloud platforms. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is considered as the main platform independent communication tool for the Cloud Web service. Generally, Cloud Web services suffer performance bottlenecks and congestions that are mainly caused by the encoding of XML messages as they are bigger than the real payloads. In this paper, Fractal clustering model is proposed to compute the Fractal clustering similarity of SOAP messages in order to cluster them and enable the aggregation of SOAP messages to significantly reduce the size of the aggregated SOAP messages. Furthermore, as Fractal is a well-known as a time-consuming technique especially for large dataset, two fast Fractal clustering models have been proposed that are aiming to reduce the required clustering time. The proposed fast Fractal models have tremendously outperformed the classical Fractal model in terms of the processing time and have outperformed both K-means and PCA combined with K-means models in terms of both the processing time and SOAP messages size reduction.
Go back and read that again….look for the word DATABASE. Did you find it?
I won’t bore you further. The IEEE does not have any papers posted that discuss how Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering can be used solve problems that require a database.
Google Research
My quest to understand more about the Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering took me to Google Research. Those results are notable in that they point to some of the same ancient papers that are available from OW2. Also, it does not appear that Google itself includes any notable references to Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering. Does Google care about this topic?
There was one interesting references from 2016 here titled Twenty-eight Years of Component-based Software Engineering. However, no specific references are cited using the word “Fractal”. It seems component based software engineering concepts date back to 1968, according to this paper.
Summary
So what have we learned?
Component-Based Software Engineering concepts have been around for 50+ years. Would you call this Disruptive Technology?
The only open source organization supporting research specifically into Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering is DOA.
None of the aged research posted by IEEE describe how Fractal Component-Based Software Engineering is used in database applications.
Nothing about this software model is patented or as far as I can tell patentable.
What would you rather use to replace ERIC?
This?
Or This?
