Component technologies: Java beans, COM, CORBA, RMI, EJB and the CORBA component model

This paper is aimed at software engineering practitioners and researchers, who are familiar with object-oriented analysis, design and programming and want to obtain an overview of the technologies that are enabling component-based development. We introduce the idea of component-based development by defining the concept and providing its economic rationale. We describe how object-oriented programming evolved into local component models, such as Java Beans and distributed object technologies, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and the Component Object Model (COM). We then address how these technologies matured into distributed component models, in particular Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the CORBA Component Model (CCM). We give an assessment of the maturity of each of these technologies and sketch how they are used to build distributed architectures.