A web-based trial execution system for software components

The reuse of software components is a key to realize the component-based development. When application programmers want to reuse software components provided by third parties on the Internet, static specification documents attached to components are insufficient as information regarding the behavioral features of components. In this paper, we propose a new system that enables the trial execution of components over the Internet from a remote site. Our system instantiates components on the server, and provides the web browser with readable property values and graphical user interface images of components whenever methods of components are invoked by input argument values. As a result of comparative evaluation, it is found that the usefulness of our system is greater than those of conventional techniques.