Component Software

Lectures
30 h

Recommended for
Recommended for Computer Science and Systems graduate students.

The course was last given
New course.

Goals
The purpose of this course is to give students insight in recent research of and development on component-based software development. It is important to understand the problems in this area as component-based technology is a promising cost-saver for industry, which is now emerging in various tools such as DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans).

Prerequisites
Knowledge in a couple of the following fields are useful for this course:

• Object-oriented analysis and design or programming
• Distributed systems
• Software Engineering
• Design patterns
• Software Architecture

Organization
Discussion-oriented seminars will be held, in which parts of the material is highlighted and discussed. An additional point may be gained by writing a report on a particual topic within component-based software engineering (e.g., real-time components).

Contents

• Motivation for components
  - introduction covering experience from software development
  - market vs. technology
  - standards
• Foundation
  - definition of a component
  - important issues: components, interface and re-entrance
  - polymorphism: friend or foe 8-)
  - objects vs. class composition (or how to avoid inheritance)
  - scale and granularity of components
  - architecture (patterns and frameworks)
  - programming (shades of gray)
• State of the art
  - wiring standards (how to connect components)
  - approaches: 1) OMG: CORBA and OMA 2) Microsoft: DCOM, OLE and ActiveX 3) Sun: Java and JavaBeans
  - comparison of approaches
  - standards
  - open problems
• The future
  - component architecture
  - component frameworks
  - component development
  - component distribution and acquisition
  - component assembly
  - on the horizon

Literature
Text book: Component Software (Beyond Object-Oriented Programming) by Clemens Szyperski. Articles.

Teachers
Sten F. Andler, Jonas Mellin

Examiner
Sten F. Andler

Schedule
January to March 2000.

Examination
Active participation during seminars, presentation of material, home exam.

Credit
3 (+1) credits