Overview

Component-based development is widely expected to revolutionize the way in which we develop, deploy, and maintain software ^[157]. The idea of component- based development is that we can generate new applications comparatively quickly, by assembling prefabricated parts, instead of continually custom designing and developing all our software from scratch, as is largely the case under the traditional development paradigm. A more important incentive for using component-based development techniques is that we are not limited only to our own prefabricated parts, but can buy high quality parts from professional component vendors. This way we can purchase other people's domain knowledge through their components, and we can eventually develop systems for which we are lacking actual experience. For example, we can buy and use third party networking components to integrate our system into a networked environment, and we can do that wireless now, because we can find the right components. One main outcome of component-based development is that we can develop larger and more complicated systems, and can do so much more quickly than before.

The vision of component-based development is to bring software engineering more in line with other engineering disciplines where assembling new products from standard prefabricated parts is the norm, and, at the same time, to save effort and improve quality. This vision of software development presents some challenges, however. With traditional development approaches, the bulk of the integration work is performed in the development environment, giving engineers the opportunity to pre-check the compatibility of the various...