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Software components are elemental units of software that can be realised within distributed, object-oriented architectures such as CORBA or DCOM. This paper describes special aspects of reuse in such componentware architectures and discusses possible mechanisms for implementation reuse. It introduces the concept of Component Adapters -software components mapping requests of client components to appropriate implementations provided by server components. These support the realisation of implementation inheritance at object level (dynamic inheritance). A management architecture is described which supports dynamic inheritance. This includes managing and maintaining a system-wide "object schema" for inter-component inheritance relationships.

Dunng the last few years, software product line engineering has gained significant interest as a way for creating software products faster and cheaper. But what architecture is needed to integrate huge amounts of products, f~om different product lines? This paper describes such an architecture and its support processes and tools. Through cases, it is illustrated how the architecture is used to integrate new -and old -products in such diverse integration projects as vessel motion control, airport baggage handling systems, pulp&paper and oil&gas, in a very large organization. However, in a large organization it is a challenge to make everyone follow an architecture. Steps taken to ensure global architectural consistency are presented. It is concluded that a single architecture can be used to unify development in a huge organization, where the distributed development practices otherwise may prohibit integration of various products.

Componentware is a new paradigm in software development that is based on the concept of a software component. Software components are self‐contained, immutable units of software which can be distributed over large networks or even over the Internet. The distribution of software components requires new, Internet‐based search and retrieval mechanisms. A set of collaborating software components is called componentware. We discuss the architectural requirements and mechanisms of componentware, a technical realisation of a componentware architecture, and identify obstacles in building componentware. Finally, we propose possible solutions for the realisation of componentware and componentware architectures.

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