Component Oriented Software and Design

Recently my ad-visor asked me to see if I could build a simulation framework which can be used for implementing + testing some new distributed computation paradigms.

I looked into some open source frameworks - and found that there are quite a few simulation frameworks available and most of them are based on component oriented software design principles. I looked up this topic on the internet and found that this was sort of the thing in the late 90s and early 00s but has now kind of faded away from the high point. Does anyone has some good books to suggest on what exactly it is? Now having some exposure to Java - I also noticed that I might have already have used some of component oriented software concepts (e.x - I have created simple wysiwyg document editors using Swing's text apis, so I am aware of concepts such as - Views, StyleContext, StyleDocument etc. etc.) - though I explicitly didn't take notice of the techniques.

Any pointers to beginner books/tutorials will be greatly appreciated. I just want to create some s开发者_Python百科mall app to see if any of this at all makes any sense.

To build a flexible simulation framework you may want to look at a functional programming language, such as Scala, as by design it works better for this since you can then either design a DSL (Domain Specific Language) to help abstract out writing the simulators, so others can focus on their research instead.

For an example of someone wanting to use Scala for a simulator you can look at Howto design a clock driven multi-agent simulation.

For an interesting page with a .NET reference that compares OOP with Component Oriented programming you can look at this blog: http://www.elenkist.com/bushido_burrito/blog/?p=11.

Before you get too wrapped around a language or technology, design out what you want to do, how you want the user to interact with your framework, then decide on the best approach, rather than trying to pick an approach and forcing your solution to work within those constraints.