Towards composing software components in both design and deployment phases

In component-based software development, the design of components should be carried out separately from the deployment of components, in order to enable composition by independent third-parties. However, current component models are biased towards either the design phase or the deployment phase. In this paper, we argue that ideally component models should include both design and deployment phases, and it should be possible to compose components in both phases. We also demonstrate a preliminary implementation of composition in both phases in a component model we have defined.