On a Taxonomy for Software Components

Object-oriented programming has been an important step forward in increasing the quality of software systems and the productivity of software engineers. Objects have brought a radical change in the way software systems are being built. Objects can be regarded as components in that they facilitate to build software systems by putting various classes (objects) together. In order to facilitate component-oriented software engineering we must loosen the dependencies among components, attain higher abstraction levels, achieve vendor/platform neutrality, and facilitate the composition of different kinds of components...