Autonomous Components

Software systems, especially information systems, tend to be interconnected. The resulting systems must have the structure of a network of autonomous components (NAC). This is the case of the information systems of world-wide companies and/or state administration. We call such system global information systems (GlobIS). GlobIS contain legacy systems, newly developed components, and third party products connected by a powerful middleware. It is shown that the autonomy of components implies that they should communicate asynchronously in the peer-to-peer mode. Practice has shown that the messages in the network should be textual in a language with a complex syntax. The advantages and/or issues of such architecture are discussed. NAC is in software a counterpart of bus architecture in hardware. Many problems of such a software are known from the research of multiagent systems. But there are facts indicating that the components in the above sense do not fit into the concept of software agent completely.