A commerce broker of software components and its experience

Proposes an SCB (Software Commerce Broker) architecture for trading software components, and discusses its experience over the Internet. Component-based software engineering is becoming a real development paradigm due to the widespread use of distributed object environments and componentware. Since software can be distributed over the Internet, a Web-based commerce of software components and packages over the Internet is emerging. To evaluate the technologies for Web-based software commerce, we developed an SCB prototype which collects and provides information on software components worldwide over the Internet with a digital catalog language named SCL (Software specification and Commerce Language). Furthermore, SCB provides a play mechanism by which customers at remote locations can play components through the Web. A series of experiences with the SCB, with some 16000 software components, revealed that the SCB is technically feasible and effective but it needs a business model for commercial operation