WWW-based Management Tool for Software Components

Cooperative software development in distributed environments has become common because of recent popularization of wide area network. In such a development fashion, reuse of software components is necessary as well as in personal or local development, and object-oriented technology is important as a basis. Reuse of object-oriented software components in distributed environments, however, has not become common yet as has been expected. This originates in not only difficulty in understanding characteristics of object-oriented software components whose structures are complicated, but also absence of support mechanisms for obtaining components in distributed environments. In this paper, first of all, we discuss what are to be handled as reusable object-oriented software components, then propose a management mechanism for promoting reuse of the components in distributed environments