Current trends such as the widespread use of advanced smart phones and the introduction of multi-core processors lead to ever increasing demands for distributed applications especially concerning concurrency and distribution. Software agents are one metaphor for dealing with these challenges already on a conceptual level. Despite its advantages, implementing agent-based systems is found to be a rather complex task compared to using more traditional object-, component-, or service-oriented technologies and for this reason the approach has only rarely been adopted in practice. The approach presented in this paper aims at simplifying the development of complex distributed systems for developers with an e.g. object-oriented background. To this end, current software paradigms are analyzed and as a result, active components are proposed as a metaphor that incorporates ideas from services, components, active objects and software agents.