Instructor

Past & Future Quarters

• COM 3240 WN/00 Home Page
• COM 3240 SP/01 Home Page
• COM 3240 SP/02 Home Page
• COM 3240 SP/03 Home Page
• Tentative for SP/04 Home Page

Required Textbook

The main source of information is: Clemens Szyperski Component Software - Beyond Object-Oriented Programming, 2/E Addison-Wesley / ACM Press, 2003 (624 pages) ISBN 0-201-74572-0 The textbook discusses components from a number of technical and non-technical perspectives.  The readings from this book will be supplemented with more focused readings on the Java Beans component technology.  In addition, we will read a number of papers related to component technology that will be distributed in class.

Software Development Product Excellence Best Book Award.

Another recommended source of information is: Krysztof Czarnecki and Ulrich Eisenecker Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications Addison-Wesley / ACM Press, 2000 (864 pages) ISBN 0-201-30977-7 Generative Programming is your complete guide and reference to Domain Engineering, Feature Modeling, Generic Programming, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Template Metaprogramming in C++, Generators, and Microsoft's Intentional Programming. Using this book you will learn how these techniques fit together and, more importantly, how to apply them in practice. We will be interested in how these emerging disciplines interact with software components.

Summarized Chapters

The following links lead to chapter summaries written by student in the COM3240 course taken in Spring 2001.
You'll need to have microsoft internet explorer 4.0 or above in order to view the presentations.

• Slides for Szyperski Book, 2nd Ed.

• Slides for Szyperski Book, 1st Ed.
  • Chapter 1 - Introduction to Component Technology
  • Chapter 2 - Market or Technology?
  • Chapter 3 - Standards
  • Chapter 4 - What a Component is and is Not
  • Chapter 5 - Components, Interface, and Re-entrance
  • Chapter 6 - Polymorphism
  • Chapter 8 - Aspects of Scale and Granularity
  • Chapter 9 - Patterns, Frameworks, Architecture
  • Chapter 10 - Programming: shades of gray
  • Chapter 12 - Object and component �wiring� standards
  • Chapter 14 - The Microsoft Way: DCOM, OLE,and ActiveX
  • Chapter 14 - Overview of chapter 14: COM, OLE and ActiveX
  • Chapter 15 - The Sun way: Java and JavaBean
  • Chapter 16,17 - Component-Based Tech. Approaches and Strategic comparison
  • Chapter 18,19 - Efforts on domain standards and open problems
  • Chapter 20 - key concepts of component architecture
  • Chapter 21 - Component Frameworks
  • Chapter 22 - Component Development
  • Chapter 23,24- Component distribution, acquisition & assembly
  • Chapter 25 - Emerging technologies in component programming domain
  • Chapter 26 - Future markets
  • Chapter 27 - New Professions in the era of component technology
  • Chapter 28 - A Component Marketing Paradox

Required Software

• a license for IBM's VisualAge for Java, v3.0, Java 2
• a license for ContextBox, a version of BeanBox that supports BeanContext manipulation
• JBuilder 3.0 (University site license)
• Sun's JDK 1.2 and BDK 1.1

Goals. The goals of the course are:

• Introduce the concept of software component, including its relationship to the object-oriented programming paradigm.
• Describe the basic issues present in component frameworks, including events, properties, introspection and reflection, persistence, and packaging.
• Introduce different component frameworks, including Java Beans, COM, and CORBA.

• build a program from existing components
• write components that can be used by others
• extend a component development environment to support new features of components

Requirements. The course will consist of readings, programming assignments, two exams, and a final project (no final exam). Students will be required to write Java and Java Beans programs applying the latest features of Java 2.

Content. Concepts of object-oriented programming that form the basis for components (e.g., generic programming, programming by contracts, programming with metaclasses.) Software architecture for supporting components (e.g., implicit invocation, filters, reflection.) Theoretical foundations of components (e.g., aspect-oriented programming, subject-oriented programming, environmental acquisition.) Concrete realizations of components in some industry standards (e.g., JavaBeans, EJB, CORBA, COM/DCOM.) Selective topics in component research. The students will do a project where some creation, deployment, and evolution methods of software components are applied.

Prerequisites

Requirements

• Each student must submit 9 out of the 10 problem sets, designed to give hands-on understanding of software components.
• Each student will give a one-hour presentation on a recent paper on Software Components, and write a short paper summarizing the content of the paper.
• Each team (pair of students) will implement a research project, and write a research report summarizing the background, content, and result of the project.
• Midterm and Final exam.

Related courses and events at Northeastern University

• MIM 3141 BC 318-F Component Software Development
• MIM 3143 SE 736-F Enterprise Software Development
• Java Developer Connection - Sun Education Essentials, Boston-Northeastern University

Software

• Northeastern's BeanContext Development Kit (BcDK 0.9beta)
• CD-ROM COM3240, Winter 2000 Edition (internal access only)

FAQ

• Question: Professor, I heard that if you play the Course CD-ROM backwards, you'll get a satanic message.
• Answer: What's more frightening is that if you play it forward, it installs the problem sets.