Software Engineering, 10th Edition

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) emerged in the late 1990s as an approach to software systems development based on reusing software components. Its creation was motivated by frustration that object-oriented development had not led to extensive reuse, as had been originally suggested. Single-object classes were too detailed and specific and often had to be bound with an application at compile-time. You had to have detailed knowledge of the classes to use them, which usually meant that you had to have the component source code. Selling or distributing objects as individual reusable components was therefore practically impossible.

Components are higher-level abstractions than objects and are defined by their interfaces. They are usually ...