This one-day tutorial is aimed at software engineering practitioners and researchers, who are familiar with object-oriented analysis, design and programming and want to obtain an overview of the technologies that are enabling component-based development. We introduce the idea of component-based development by defining the concept and providing its economic rationale. We describe how object-oriented programming evolved into local component models, such as Java Beans and distributed object technologies, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and the Component Object Model (COM). We then address how these technologies matured into distributed component models, in partiuclar Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the CORBA Component Model (CCM). We give an assessment of the maturity of each of these technologies and sketch how they are used to build distributed architectures.

Potential advantages brought about by distributed system architectures has given rise to the number of applications being based around it. Advantages include an increase in fault tolerance due to replicated components and achieving cost effective scalability by distributing the execution of a task over several relatively cheap hosts rather than a central mainframe. The construction of distributed applications via the direct use of network operating system primitives is no longer feasible and middleware technologies are fast becoming the alternative approach. We note that amongst the different form of middleware, distributed object middleware offers the richest support to application designers and incorporates primitives for distributed transaction management and asynchronous message passing. From the set of distributed object middleware approaches, we concentrate on CORBA because it offers the richest set of synchronization and threading primitives.

This one-day tutorial is aimed at software engineering practitioners and researchers, who are familiar with object-oriented analysis, design and programming and want to obtain an overview of the technologies that are enabling component-based development. We introduce the idea of component-based development by defining the concept and providing its economic rationale. We describe how object-oriented programming evolved into local component models, such as Java Beans and distributed object technologies, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and the Component Object Model (COM). We then address how these technologies matured into distributed component models, in particular Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the CORBA Component Model (CCM). We give an assessment of the maturity of each of these technologies and sketch how they are used to build distributed architectures.

The behaviour of a distributed system is largely determined by the use of synchronization primitives and threading policies of the underlying middleware. The inherent parallel nature of distributed systems may cause liveness problems, such as deadlocks and livelocks. An increasing number of distributed systems is built using object middleware. We exploit the fact that modern object middleware offers only a few built-in synchronization and threading primitives by suggesting UML stereotypes to represent each of these primitives in distributed object design. We define the semantics of the stereotypes using a process algebra. We use that semantics to translate UML diagrams into behaviourally equivalent process algebra representations and can then use model checking techniques to find potential deadlocks. The paper also shows how the model checking results can be related back to the original UML diagrams.