Component Trading: the Basis for a Component-Oriented Development Framework

Component-oriented software seems promising in providing the dynamism and flexibility necessary to realise the Virtual Enterprise (VE) model for dynamic business organisations. According to the VE model, and from the perspective of componentoriented programming, a virtual enterprise system could be constructed by marshalling the necessary services through composition of available components selected from a collection provided by the participating enterprise systems to form the new virtual enterprise system. In this context the process of selecting and composing of components is not a trivial task. This paper proposes the use of a component trading facility, which introduces the notion of semantic trading, to support the component selection and composition process.