Software commerce broker over the Internet

This article proposes an architecture of SCB (Software Commerce Broker) which aims at trading software packages and components over the Internet. Component-based software engineering is coming into real development paradigm due to widespread distributed objects environment and componentware. Since software can be distributed over the Internet, a Web-based commerce of software components and packages over the Internet is emerging. To realize Web-based software commerce, we develop a prototype of SCB, which collects information on software components worldwide over the Internet and provides a set of electronic catalogues of software components in a semi-formal specification language SCL (Software specification and Commerce Language). Furthermore, SCB provides play mechanism on which customers in remote locations can play the component through the Web. SCB is under evaluation in the Next Generation Software Engineering Program of Software CALS (Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support) project in Japan.