Component Programming - a Fresh Look at Software Components

All engineering disciplines rely on standard components to design and build artifacts. The key technical challenge in software engineering is to enable the adoption of such a model to the development of software. The transformation from line-by-line development to component-based development will address many of the industry’s productivity and quality problems. Indeed, component-based software development has been a longstanding dream of the software industry, prompting a search for both technical and nontechnical solutions. A successful approach to componentbased development requires a comprehensive solution that draws on advances in programming languages, programming paradigms, algorithm analysis, and software design. The technical problem can only be addressed by such an integrated solution. This paper presents an approach based on the C++ Standard Template Library. More than a traditional library, STL embodies a concrete approach to software design based on a well-defined taxonomy and theory of software components. I present the fundamental contributions of STL to a paradigm of component programming-a component-based software development paradigm in which there is a clear separation between component development and application development. I motivate component programming, give the requirements for components and catalogs, and give an example of component programming applied to the standard Keyword in Context (KWIC) problem. I then summarize the implications of component programming for the software industry and for software engineering education.