Uniqueness

1. Uniqueness This technology is unique in several aspects

2. The Prime Characteristic • The concepts closely mirror those of modern integrated circuit market and technology • Integrated circuits are hardware components • This technology considers software components No existing software technology does this

3. Unique Combination • The concepts exploit a unique combination of an open market mechanism and a robust software component technology • Only in this combination the goal of empowering the software community with much higher efficiency can be achieved No existing technology does this

4. Open Market • From the ground up, the technology supports an open market of software components • Publicly accessible repositories give world wide access to the formal specifications of contributing software components • Worldwide services and tools cooperate to provide secure licensing of the software components • The supplied products effectively hide the encapsulated IP that was invested in their development No existing technology does this

5. Integrated tools & services • Client tools and Web-based services cooperate closely to establish a worldwide market for software components and to support reliable system integration • A central service assures that necessary publications and the corresponding products are always accessible • Full role-based user authorization and authentication together with strong encryption ensures that nothing can be corrupted or stolen No existing technology does this

6. Integrated tools & services • Web services and remoting services cooperate to enable large numbers of users to work concurrently • An integrated accounting service takes care that all stakeholders are correctly paid and that customers get quality products and services in return for their investments. No existing technology does this

7. Robust Products • Target systems can be configured completely from robust and well proven components • This will render the target systems robust No existing technology does this

8. Price and Quality • The marketing mechanism will provide a healthy price /quality ratio for the components • The marketing mechanism will provide a large availability and great diversity of reusable components • This will cause a healthy price /quality ratio for the target systems No existing technology does this

9. Efficient search mechanisms • Several search terms can be attached to design items • Users can use a local or a remote search base • A fast and powerful search mechanism uses logical combinations of search terms to find a set of items that fulfills the criteria No existing technology does this

10. Retrieval of selection • The set returned by the search mechanism is displayed and subsets can be selected • Set members can be viewed in detail • The items in the selected subsets can be downloaded No existing technology does this

11. Uniform approach • The technology provides a uniform approach for all supported platforms • Hardware platforms • Intel 386 • Mips • Arm • Virtual Machines • Java • .Net • Operating systems • Windows • UNIX • Linux No existing technology does this

12. Robust Component Object Model • On virtual machine platforms the object model is defined by a base class • On other platforms the object model is based on a binary component object model • Binary object models are independent of the applied programming language No existing technology does this

13. Memory Management • On all supported platforms garbage collection is provided • No danger of memory leaks This is an excellent feature

14. Real-time Support • Real-time support recons with the special requirements of component technology • On virtual machine platforms the technology supports soft real-time • On hardware platforms the technology supports hard real-time • On hardware platforms the technology recons with resource restrictions No existing component technology supports resource-restricted embedded applications

15. Interfaces • Components are only accessible by publicly specified interfaces • Interfaces and reusable types are published on publicly accessible repositories • Components that use popular interfaces and interfaces that use popular types have a greater chance to be (re)used • The technology stimulates use of ‘standard’ interfaces and types No existing technology does this

16. Complete specification • The technology relies on complete specification • Using hard encapsulated components make this feasible • An automate can check whether components can work together • An automate can configure a completely specified target • An automate can supply a tailored infrastructure No existing technology does this

17. Packaging • Components are supplied in binary packages that contain the implementation of the classes of the components • Several ways of packaging are possible • A package may contain a coherent set of component classes • A package may contain the wish-list of a system architect No existing technology exploits this

18. Gluing • System configuration tools automatically add a tailored infrastructure that glues the instances of components together and that supports the proper working of the components • The added infrastructure encapsulates the services provided by the platform or it provides all required operating system tasks No existing technology does this

19. Codeless System Configuration • There is a large chance that most of the required components can be found on the market • When all required components are available, then a system architect can design and configure a target system without typing a single line of code No existing technology does this

20. Time to market • Depending on the availability of the required components, the time to market can be reduced with several orders of magnitude • If all components are present, then hundreds of man years reduce to a few man weeks No existing technology does this

21. Other Unique Items • More technical based items are: • the special repository structure, require interfaces, hardware interfaces, streaming interfaces, connection schemes, connection requests, reset and cleanup methods, disclosed information, package managers, instance managers, the gluing mechanism, the garbage collector, heap-memory references, repair tasks, task schedules, system modes, etc. • These aspects are not minor in importance. However, it requires technical insight to be able to recon that importance. • Further, the tools that exploit these unique aspects become unique as well.