Episode 87: Software Components

In this episode, Michael and Markus talk about software components.
We first looked at a couple of attempts at defining what a
component is. We then provided our own definition that will be used
in the rest of the episode. We then looked at the promises of
component-based development: why are components useful? We then
discussed some of the typical metadata components should specify to
make them useful. We discussed to some extent typical variations in
component models. The next topic was the separation of concerns
between the component functionality and functionality provided by
the component's execution environment (aka. container). We then
compared components with other (more or less) related technologies
such as OO and SOA. We concluded the episode with the notion of
architecture as language, where you use a formal DSL to describe a
system's architecture. Components are the basic building block for
this approach.