1 Background

The authors of this paper are members of the Software Technology Group (GISUM) at the University of Málaga, where they have participated in a number of research projects related to Software Engineering for open and heterogeneous distributed systems [DRT97a], and to the application of formalisms to several fields, such as the integration of programming paradigms (object-orientation, concurrency, functional and logic models) [PT93,DPT94,MP97], and the specification and validation of communication protocols [MT96]. Recently, our interest shifted from object-orientation to component-orientation, and the application of the latter to different levels of the development process. Some of the currently most active research directions in the group involve Software Architecture [CPT97], Coordination Models [DRT97b], Component-Based systems [VT97] and Component-Oriented Application Frameworks [FT97].