Component-based Development (CBD) is based on the idea of building software systems by composing pre-existing software components. This particular activity within the CBD process is usually called development with reuse.

In previous work we introduced an alternative component composition approach based on pasive components which offer computation and connectors that encapsulate schemes to deal with communication and coordination among software components [3]. In our approach, both components and connectors can be reused to construct composite components and component-based systems in a systematic manner.

By analysing the communication and coordination needs in several component-based applications, a catalogue of connectors to support development with reuse has been defined [1]. To automate the development process, we have developed a working prototype of a visual composition environment [2]. The architecture of the development environment consists of five main elements: (1) a component repository, (2) a connector repository, (3) a visual assembler, (4) a code generator and (5) an execution environment.

The composition environment supports development with reuse by dragging, dropping and connecting pre-existing components and pre-existing connectors from the component and connector repositories into the visual assembler. Our uses reflection techniques to perform structural introspection on components' binaries and their interfaces to retrieve the information about the services that the components offer.

Once a composite component or a component-based system architecture is defined, the code generator generates the binary file representing it. This file is meant to be deployed and eventually executed on the execution environment, which is a JVM.