Virtual Private Components: An Approach for Leasing Components

摘要

Component technology has become an important approach to set up distributed applications and systems. Components possess exactly specified or standardized interfaces and explicit context dependencies. They can be purchased at component markets and integrated into the application. The purchase of components, however, might be not the onliest solution in future. If a component requires large resources, an expensive maintenance, or a high degree of topicality it might be more favourable like in everyday life to lease a component for a certain time. This can save purchase cost and give the customer the possibility to always use the newest version of a component. The leasing of components requires a particular framework. Beside a contract which defines the conditions of the component use, a technical infrastructure is required which ensures the availability of the service and the enforcement of the contract agreements. In this paper we present a technical framework for the leasing of components called Virtual Private Components. We further present an architecture to support the leasing of components and discuss implementation issues. Finally, we present a prototype implementation.