Beyond Objects Component-Based Software Engineering (Smith) As the speed of change in both business and technology increases, post Y2K, it's becoming increasingly clear that software development needs to move from a craft activity to a modern industrial process capable of using componentization to reduce cost and time-to-market. The Windows 2000 and Enterprise JavaBeans platforms are arguably the first mature platforms specifically designed to support enterprise scale component-based applications. Over the next few years, most new applications will be delivered onto one or the other of these platforms. The new component-based platforms are also being complemented by widespread adoption of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as an internal and external interoperability backplane, which enables heterogeneous component connectivity.Specific issues that will be addressed by the panel include What are the trade-offs and risks associated with proprietary or market-dominate systems? From the perspective of a component assembler, what are the most important dimensions of choice? Is the issue of state incompatible with the notion of component? What about the issue of quality in components? Should over-all application quality be based on the lowest-common denominator of component quality? Issues related to components and contracts: shortcomings of existing Interface Definition Languages (IDLs); different ways of defining contracts (i.e. in a programming language like Eiffel or Java/C++ versus a modeling language like UML/OCL); implicit versus explicit contracts; the role of tools like syntax and semantic checkers, runtime checkers, and contract verifiers in a design by contract environment for component-based development.