Distributed software: from component model to software architecture

Today, Information Systems are often distributed and heterogeneous. Thus, software systems become more and more complex and their evolution is difficult to manage. Our works deal with prolonging life of heterogeneous distributed systems with the help of component reuse. Such systems need a distributed adaptable software architecture to be implemented. In this paper, we propose a component model for redeveloping software. First, we briefly present the component paradigm in which we place our works. Then we position our component model with regard to related works. The interface of the component is described by the way of points of interaction. These points are used to manage different types of interactions in order to build a graph of interactions allowing the integration of the reused components. We finish with the presentation of the distributed adaptable software architecture allowing to implement this graph. Each part of this paper is illustrated with a concrete case, the European ASIMIL project.