Abstract:

Our experiences with basing application architectures on component
structures have shown us that component based architectures result in
several advantages such as greater reuse and consistency, ease of
maintenance etc. But there are also a number of problems arising when using
binary components. We see most of these problems falling in one of the
following categories: Culture and organisation, documentation and component
management. We propose a number of tools and related techniques that will
help lessen the problems arising when using binary components. The tools
will address issues such as auto-generating documentation, managing
components in different configurations and formal specification and run-time
test of functionality.