I. Crnkovic, V. Gruhn, and M. Book (Eds.): ECSA 2011, LNCS 6903, pp. 216–219, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 A Reusable Business Tier Component with a Single Wide Range Static Interface Oscar M. Pereira 1 , Rui L. Aguiar 1 , and Maribel Yasmina Santos 2 1 Instituto de Telecomunicações, University of Aveiro 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal {omp,ruilaa}@ua.pt 2 Algoritmi Research Center, University of Minho 4800 Guimarães, Portugal {maribel}@dsi.uminho.pt Abstract. This research proposes an architecture for reusable components aimed at bridging the object-oriented and the relational paradigms. The component, referred to here as Business Tier Component, provides a single wide range static interface able to manage a set of Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) expressions, deployed at runtime and of any complexity, on behalf of application tiers. The only constraint is that the required interface to manage each CRUD expression must be a super-interface of the provided wide range interface. The main research challenge of this paper is the definition of an architecture for reusable components aimed at managing dynamically a set of CRUD expressions, deployed at runtime, on behalf of application tiers. Keywords: reusable component, business tier, databases, impedance mismatch. 1 Introduction Object-oriented and relational paradigms are simply too different to bridge seamlessly, leading to a set of difficulties informally known as impedance mismatch [1], which is an open issue for more than 50 years [2]. To tackle the impedance mismatch, several solutions have been proposed, including Call-Level Interfaces (CLI) [3, 4], Embedded SQL [5], object-to-relational mapping techniques (O/RM) [6, 7], language extensions [7] and persistent frameworks [8, 9]. These solutions are mostly tailored to cope with the principle of “new project implies new development process” staying in opposite to approaches based on component-based software engineering (CBSE) [10]. CBSE is a sub-discipline of software engineering aimed at promoting the reuse of components to build software systems. This paper presents the basis for a reusable-component-based approach aimed at bridging the object-oriented and the relational paradigms hereafter known as Business Tier Component (BTC). Each BTC is developed to provide a single wide range static interface able to accommodate a set of CRUD expressions that are needed to implement a business tier. Among their main features, each BTC has the capacity to accept, at runtime, the information regarding the business logic to be implemented.