Section: Scientific Foundations

Component model

Software component technology  [85] has been emerging for some years, even though its underlying intuition is not very recent. Building an application based on components emphasizes programming by assembly , that is, manufacturing , rather than by development . The goals are to focus expertise on specific domains, to improve software quality, and to decrease the time-to-market thanks to reuse of existing codes.

Component technology is being widely applied to building distributed and parallel applications. The Common Component Architecture (CCA) is a component model developed by the CCA Forum that specifically addresses the needs of the HPC community [61] . It defines a minimal set of standard interfaces that any high-performance component framework should provide to and expect from components, in order to allow them to be composed into a running application. The Grid Component Model (GCM) is a component model developed within the CoreGRID Network of Excellence that targets developing grid applications [66] . GCM is defined as an extension of Fractal, a general component model for implementing, deploying, and managing complex software systems [68] .

Recent component models are increasingly including support for service-oriented computing, which currently receives a lot of attention from industry and academia. Service-oriented computing promotes building flexible systems by dynamically discovering and integrating services provided over the network [83] . OSGI is a popular service-oriented Java-based component model that enables components to publish, discover and bind to services in a dynamic way [82] .