Relation with other approaches

Contrary to popular belief, object-oriented languages do not form a panacea for software engineering in general and reuse in particular. Frakes & Fox (1995) show that reuse does not depend on the implementation language used. In particular, of the two OO languages appearing in their survey (SmallTalk and C++) no positive effect on reuse was found. Yourdon (1993) gives arguments for this. This explains why we have stressed the importance of heterogeneity: being able to combine programs written in different languages.

Although communication infrastructures like, for instance, CORBA (OMG, 1996) also enable building multi-language applications, they do not provide the strong separation between coordination and computation as we do.

Contrary to many software engineering frameworks or approaches based on formal techniques, we take a very liberal stand: our evolutionary, component-based, approach is neutral to and can be combined with many different--formal or informal--methodologies and techniques.