Component-based development is a trend towards building e-commerce applications. However, commercial components are rarely used during the development. The reason is that existing approaches to selecting and composing components suffer from the problem that the components retrieved usually do not exactly fit with other components in the system being developed. While formal methods can be used to describe and check semantic characteristics to better match components, there are practical limitations which restrict their adoption.

We have proposed a framework to support a semantic description and selection of components. We used Simple Component Interface Language (SCIL) to describe user requirements and pre-built components from the current component sources. Specifications in SCIL can be translated to a variety of models including those that have a formal basis.

In this paper, we preform a case study of searching commercial components for a generic e-commerce application. We specify the commercial components in SCIL and use two specific tools: jMocha and Alloy Analyser to identify the correct components that suit a particular task.