Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Deployable components are software components that can easily be installed and uninstalled. This usually means that they are compiled and do not consist of source code. Composition environments enable the use of deployable components by making it possible to compose applications out of deployable components and to execute those applications. A composition environment is based on a component model, and consists of a set of tools to support the composition process performed by a user. We describe the basic features of composition environments, and survey a representative selection of environments from research and industry. We conclude that the domain of composition environments is not well understood yet, and point out possible directions of future research.