Have Software Components finally arrived
Introduction In April 2013 Dr Dobbs editorial piece summoned a long held vision for software components and reuse. It proclaimed : “After 40 years in the desert of incompatibility and limited reuse, we have crossed the river Jordan.” It was a romantic notion and it provides a sign post for a vision about software components that stretches back to 1968. 1968 Software Engineering NATO Conference Components became part of the software engineering discipline in the very first Software Engineering conference in 1968. Sponsored by NATO, the conference brought together the leading researchers at the time. In a presentation provided by M. D. McIlroy, titled, “Mass Produced Software Components”, McIlory set out the fundamental principles by which a industry based on the production of software components could be founded. “My thesis is that the software industry is weakly founded, and that one aspect of this weakness is the absence of a software components subindu...