Type management: a key to software reuse in open distributed systems

Reuse of software components available in open distributed systems is a promising approach for efficient development of complex distributed applications. In open distributed systems, type mechanisms are used both to find appropriate external software components and also to guarantee that their respective interfaces match. Furthermore, a type manager allows application developers to interactively browse existing functionality and enables the automatic mediation of compatible software components at run-time. This paper presents a uniform view for handling the functionality offered by software components regardless of context-specific aspects and a framework that allows for the automatic deduction of different flavors of compatibility relations. Finally, we describe our current type management prototype implementation.