Implementation reuse and inheritance in distributed component systems

Software components are elemental units of software that can be realised within distributed, object oriented architectures such as CORBA or DCOM. The 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.