The engineering of distributed software is a complex task which requires a rigorous approach. Software architectural (structural) concepts and principles are highly beneficial in specifying, designing, analysing, constructing and evolving distributed software. A rigorous architectural approach dictates formalisms and techniques that are compositional, components that are context independent and systems that can be constructed and evolved incrementally. This extended abstract overviews some of the underlying reasons for adopting this architectural approach and provides a brief "rational history" [1] of our research work, together with some selected references.