Instructor

Kung-Kiu Lau, The University of Manchester

Abstract

Component-based Development (CBD) is an important emerging topic in Software Engineering, promising long sought after benefits like increased reuse and reduced time-to-market (and hence software production cost). However, there are at present many obstacles to overcome before CBD can succeed. For one thing, CBD success is predicated on a standardised market place for software components, which does not yet exist. In fact currently CBD even lacks a universally accepted terminology. Existing component models adopt different component definitions and composition operators. Therefore much research remains to be done. We believe that the starting point for this endeavour should be a thorough study of current component models, identifying their key characteristics and comparing their strengths and weaknesses. A desirable side-effect would be clarifying and unifying the CBD terminology. In this tutorial, we present a clear and concise exposition of all the current major software component models, including a taxonomy. The purpose is to distill and present knowledge of current software component models, as well as to present an analysis of their properties with respect to commonly accepted criteria for CBD. The taxonomy also provides a starting point for a unified terminology.

Biography

Kung-Kiu Lau holds BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Leeds, UK. After a temporary appointment at Leeds, he moved to the University of Manchester, UK, where he is now a senior lecturer. His main research areas are Component-based Software Development and Formal Program Development in Computational Logic. He is the series editor of the book series on Component-based Software Development, published by World Scientific. He is an area editor for Logic and Software Engineering for the Journal of Applied Logic. He has served on numerous international conference programme committees. He has also delivered invited talks at many international meetings.