1 Background

Since my graduation in the late eighties, I have worked at the University teaching and doing research, and also being a partner in some granted projects. All of these activities have taken the concept of component as a prominent one, usually in the form of abstract data type.

About my research, I have been mainly involved in the study of formal specifications, remarkably in the algebraic framework, which was the former goal of my Ph.D. Later, I slightly switched the subject of my thesis to include non-functional aspects of software in the algebraic framework. The final result was a language (with completely defined formal semantics) to complement the usual algebraic specifications and imperative implementations of components with non-functional information appearing in both of them [Fra96].

On the other hand, my teaching activity has focused in data structures courses and also in programming-in-the-large with abstract data types. One of the main results of this activity is the publication of a book on data structures [Fra93]. As remarkable points of this book, I would like to mention that: data structures are defined just as means to implement abstract data types; and, I have included a whole chapter to study the design of new data structures to implement new abstract data types. Precisely, this last chapter emphasises the concept of reusable component as the main tool to build new software.

Last, I have participated in a pair of granted projects (the ICARUS Esprit project and a national one) both of them again focusing in formal specification of abstract data types. Recently, I have obtained a grant for a new project entitled ``ComProLab: A Component Programming Laboratory" (outlined at [FBBR97]), leading a group of six researchers.