Component-Oriented Software Technology

Modern software systems are increasingly required to be open and distributed. Such systems are open not only in terms of network connections and interoperability support for heterogeneous hardware and software platforms, but, above all, in terms of evolving and changing requirements. Although object-oriented technology offers some relief, to a large extent the languages, methods and tools fail to address the needs of open systems because they do not escape from traditional models of software development that assume system requirements to be closed and stable. We argue that open systems requirements can only be adequately addressed by adopting a component-oriented as opposed to a purely object-oriented software development approach, by shifting emphasis away from programming and towards generalized software composition.