It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to the 1998 ICSE Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE). This workshop provides an opportunity for research and practice to meet, and to assess the current state of what may well prove to be an emerging paradigm for software development.

Scarcely a week goes by without some new advance in the technology base supporting component-based software development. The gap between academic research and commercial realization is shrinking. The trend towards a commercial software component industry is clearly intensifying and, as a result, industry often leads academia in introducing innovative concepts into CBSE. The pace of innovation in CBSE technology also shows no signs of slackening, and in many ways appears to be accelerating. New tools and development environments appear almost daily in the marketplace. Since information technology plays an ever more vital role in industrial competitiveness, there is tremendous pressure to adopt CBSE despite its relative instability.

But what is CBSE? Many recent advances in CBSE technology have centered on Java--but this is only part of the picture. While Web technology and its spillover into enterprise information management systems (so called "Intranets") have certainly provided impetus to many developments in CBSE (including Java itself), other antecedent technologies such as the Object Management Group's CORBA and Microsoft's (D)COM reflect a long-simmering demand for software component technology. But technology is only part of the story. Associated with CBSE technology is a range of new software engineering approaches to design, construction, testing, configuration management, reuse, and so forth. And the emergence of a robust software component marketplace may fundamentally change the way the software industry operates.

The goal of this workshop is to articulate what it is that constitutes CBSE, in all of its many facets and the proceedings express a number of different viewpoints on CBSE. While there is always some degree of arbitrariness in any classification scheme, the papers submitted reflect four distinct themes, and the workshop and these proceedings have been organized around these themes, which are:

Components: Concepts and Models

Components and Object-Orientation

Components: Tools and Technology

Components in Practice