Objectively: Components versus Web Services

Abstract

We are observing a dramatic confluence of several different aspects: software components, software as a service, and an ever growing space of Internet and Web standards. Over the past year all major players in the software industry have announced their support of XML Web Services in one form or another. So, are services here to displace components? And what about our good old objects?

Drawing boundaries that help to understand the key concepts without obstructing the path towards future development is important but challenging. Concepts such as contracts, specifications, and perhaps even the very notion of correctness need to be rethought. Or are they? A strange feeling of deja vue spreads as we see computer science and software engineering rediscovered - this time at your service.

After years of both academic and entrepreneurial experience, Clemens Szyperski has joined Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington in early 1999, where he works on furthering the principles, technologies, and methods supporting component software. He is the author of the award-winning book

“Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming” (Addison Wesley), now in its second edition, and of numerous other publications. He has served on program committees for major international conferences, including ECOOP, ICSE, and OOPSLA and he is a frequent speaker at events of both academic and industrial nature.

Clemens received his Masters in Electrical Engineering in 1987 from the Aachen Institute of Technology, in Germany. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1992 from ETH Zurich under the guidance of Niklaus Wirth. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, he was tenured as associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, where he continues to hold an adjunct professorship. He is a cofounder of Oberon Microsystems, Inc., Zurich, with its recent spinoff, esmertec inc, also Zurich.

Clemens’homepage is at: http://www.research.microsoft.com/~cszypers/programming.