This work give an introduction to the field of Component-based software engineering (CBSE), which is a subfield of software engineering. CBSE is often viewed in analogy to the automobile industry. Just as automobiles are assembled with half-products, software systems consist of components. These software components should be a preproduced part, with the ability for reuse and with characteristics that are easy to maintain and customize. To provide these characteristics, software components have to be realized in a component model, which provides a well-defined environment for them. This work has described the main competing component models, which are OMG's CORBA Component Model (CCM), Microsoft's COM DCOM COM+ family and SUN Microsystems´ JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans. To give a more practical view of CBSE, a case study component was included in this work. The Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) has been chosen as platform to realize the case study component. The case study application (SOAPStore with a test component) is a flexible software component, which stores binary data objects combined with meta data. The meta data contains information on a specific binary data object. The binary data object can be, for example, an image data file. The meta data are XML data and can be customer defined. An EJB and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) were used to realize the case study component. It work show how the SOAPStore could be distributed as a Web service. A WSDL description of the SOAPStore software component has been defined. Through this description, a Web service client could implement a client application and access the Web service.

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