Reconciling Components and Services: The Apam Component-Service Platform

For Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE), an application is a strongly structured and rigid assembly of components. Conversely, Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is very flexible and is a good candidate for supporting dynamic applications. Unfortunately dynamic applications are software applications and as such they need to be clearly structured and managed (as with CBSE), and they need flexibility and dynamism as with SOC. No platform today satisfies both needs. This paper presents the Component-Service model that combines well controlled structure and dynamism, and its implementation into the Apam component-service platform.