Supporting evolution and maintenance of components using a remote service architecture

As the software engineering community moves towards a programming philosophy in which integrators pull together disparate components from multiple sources, there is an increased need to control and record the configuration of systems as they evolve over time. This paper presents VACUUM, an approach to configuration management (CM) for components, and an architecture based around component warehouses, remote catalogues of components which can be accessed as plug-in services. It also describes a prototype implementation of the. VACUUM CM system and associated architecture. It is shown that this work begins to address those factors identified as important to growth in the component marketplace, and also meets many of the established requirements for CM systems.