Software components encourage code reuse and simplify application development. An increasing number of applications are built assembling components developed by third parties, taking advantage of language-independence, object orientation, ease of use and other features of modern component architectures.
Computer algebra systems could exploit the software component approach, but several issues must be addressed, mostly due to the sophisticated data structures required for representing mathematical objects. We discuss these problems and present a proposal based on the OpenMath specifications.
We built an prototype framework for developing and using mathematical components. The framework uses IDL from CORBA for specifying the interfaces for objects. Code developed in the framework is mapped into either the COM object model for creating ActiveX components or into CORBA objects for creating servers implemented as dynamic modules.