Component architectures and services: From application construction to scientific workflows

Abstract

The idea of building computer applications by composing them out of reusable software components is a concept that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as developers began to realize that the complexity of software was evolving so rapidly that a different approach was needed if actual software development was going to keep pace with the demands placed upon it.1 This fact had already been realized by hardware designers. By the mid 1970s, it was standard practice to build digital systems by composing them from standard, well-tested integrated circuits that encapsulated sophisticated, powerful subsystems that we easily reused in thousands of applications. By the 1990s, even the designers of integrated circuits such as microprocessors were building them by composing them from standard cell libraries that provided components such as registers and floating-point units that could be arranged on the chip and easily integrated to form a full processor. Now, multiple processor cores can be assembled on a single chip as components of larger systems. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited.