Component-oriented software development not only requires a change of mind-set and methodology: it also requires new technological support. In this section, we will review some of the issues that arise:
• What are the paradigms and mechanisms for binding components together? What is the structure of a software component?
10 Component-Oriented Software Technology
• At which stage do composition decisions occur, i.e. how can we characterize the composition process?
• How do we formally model components and composition, and how can we verify that fragments are correctly composed?
• To which extend does a concurrent computational model affect software composition?
These questions obviously are interrelated; moreover, they depend heavily on the composition paradigm being used. We have argued that, ideally, a complete environment for software composition should somehow provide a combination of objects, functions and agents. So far, these paradigms have evolved quite independently. In order to combine them into a common environment, considerable care must be taken to integrate them cleanly. In the following, we examine the specific contributions of each paradigm to software composition, we discuss how they may be integrated, and we summarize the principle
open research problems.
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