Integrated framework for development and execution of component-based Grid applications

Component-based software technologies have emerged as a modern approach to software development for distributed and Grid applications. However, the lack of longer-term experience and the complexity of the target systems demand more research results in the field. This paper provides an overview of three different approaches to developing component-based Grid applications. In order to re-use legacy codes, the wrapper software approach can be adopted in its two flavours - hand-written or automatically generated wrapper code. Another approach applicable to existing object-oriented software is to componentise the code by introducing appropriate modifications. The third approach is component-oriented development from scratch. We compare and contrast the three approaches and highlight their advantages and weaknesses.