Component-level programming: a revolution in software technology

A profound change is taking place in the world of applications programming. Some of the most profound new developments are web-based hosting of components and distributed components that run interactively on several different machines. Students can be exposed to component-level programming through a visual language such as Visual Basic, but this will not expose the student to the full scope of the most recent developments. This paper describes the advances in component-level programming, and gives suggestions for integrating component-level development into existing curricula. The paper first describes custom controls, the precursor to component-level programming, and shows how the concepts of custom controls have evolved into more comprehensive standards. The use of existing components in several different contexts is discussed. The most important contexts are standard application development, web-based design, and distributed application development. We show how a single component could be used in each of these contexts. We illustrate these uses with examples from our own work in VLSI Design Automation. In addition we discuss the development of new components, and how best to integrate component development into the undergraduate curriculum. Component development is discussed in the context of the emerging COM standard which is available on a wide variety of platforms and a wide variety of programming languages.