Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is becoming one of the great concerns of researchers and practitioners within the academic areas of computer science and the software industry. After the focus on object-oriented programming, design and modelling during the 90s, reuse and reusability of software entities is nowadays slowed down by new factors. The size of components, their deployment capability, their compatibility and interoperability features in order to be incorporated into heterogeneous co-operative environments, their faults tolerance, and above all, their ability to fulfill performance conditions, are critical expectations of software engineers. Despite the maturity of the component market and some available results coming from academic research, software engineering and as a result CBSE, remain somehow, a backward discipline, since no modern technique of component composition has been recognized as satisfactory. This edited volume aims to complement some other reputable books on CBSE, by stressing how components are built for large-scale applications, within dedicated development processes and for easy and direct combination.
This book emphasizes these three facets and offers a complete overview of recent progress in 2002. Projects and works explained herein aim to prompt graduate students, academics, software engineers, project managers and developers to adopt and to apply new component development methods gained from and validated by the authors.