The architectural style of component programming

Component programming is a multiparadigm approach to software construction based on highly generic components. Because component programming is concerned with source-code components, it is assumed by many to be a low-level approach to software development that affects only the development of source code libraries. On the contrary, this paper shows that the concepts of component programming go beyond library and source code issues and define a new conceptual attempt to software development with generic components. We show that component programming is an architectural style that supports the building of classes of software architectures in a specific domain. Component programming can be applied in the early stages of software development when architectural issues are to be determined. All the benefits of using an architectural style, therefore, can also be gained by using component programming: it guides the engineer in the problem decomposition towards the design and implementation of a system. The paper presents the architectural style of component programming and the insights we gained about component programming as we tried to define it as an architectural style