Towards a visual approach for component-based software development

The ever increasing emphasis on distributed systems has led to advances in the client/server model and the emergence of component-based software development as an important paradigm in software engineering. Along with the new computer technologies it is necessary to reuse legacy code. Approaches to application development over, for example, the Internet are important if this is to be successful. This paper examines these issues and argues that incorporating the ideas of the component-based approach and reuse can significantly assist the application software developer. It demonstrates an approach through the development of an interactive/visual environment for component-based assembly.