Component technology promotes code-reuse by enabling the construction of complex applications by assembling of-the-shelf components. However, components depend on certain characteristics of the environment in which they execute. They depend on other software components and on hardware resources. In existing component architectures, the application developer is left with the task of resolving those dependencies, i.e., making sure that each component has access to all the resources it needs and that all the required components are loaded. Nevertheless, according to encapsulation principles, developers should not be aware of the component internals. Thus, it may be dicult to fi nd out what a component really needs. In complex systems, this manual approach to dependency management can lead to disastrous results. In this paper, we propose an integrated architecture for managing dependencies in distributed component-based systems in an efective and uniform way. The architecture supports automatic configuration and dynamic resource management in distributed heterogeneous environments. We describe a concrete implementation of this architecture and present experimental results.

this paper we describe the requirements faced by such a system and propose an integrated architecture meeting these requirements. The paper focuses on a representation of Active Spaces using standard Naming and Trading mechanisms and on an object-oriented framework for managing heterogeneous devices.