Guideliness for Identifying Obstacles When Composing Distributed Systems from Components

Abstract

Component-oriented programming enables software engineers to implement complex applications from a set of pre-defined components. Although this technique has several advantages, experiences show that effective composition of components remains a difficult task. This is especially true if the software system is physically distributed. This chapter provides a set of guidelines to identify the obstacles that software engineers may experience while designing distributed systems using the current component technology. To this aim, the computer science domain is divided into several sub-domains, and each subdomain is described using its important aspects. Further, each aspect is analyzed with respect to the current component technology. This analysis helps software engineers to identify the possible obstacles for each aspect of a sub-domain. The chapter concludes with references to the relevant research activities that are presented in this book.