Software semantic provisioning: Actually reusing software

Software development nowadays largely consists of adapting existing functionalities or components to perform in a new environment, and is biased towards delivering component-oriented architectures. Finding, choosing, provisioning and integrating the right libraries or components is still an ad-hoc and error prone task. This paper describes the SSP (Software Semantic Provisioning) project, funded in its early stages by Google™ Inc., developed during the Google Summer of Code™ 2007 program, and incubated by the Eclipse Software Foundation; the project aims to actually achieve software reuse in an effective, reliable and developer-friendly fashion, integrating cutting edge technologies in the component provisioning and integration areas, and providing support to decision-making in choosing the right dependencies set. A prototypical RESTful repository, and an Eclipse plug-in consuming the repository services have been implemented and will be discussed.