HotAgent: Round Trip Component Development

In recent years, software development with components has become more and more popular. Component technology promises efficient software development, emphasizing reliability and re-usability. Unfortunately, many current development environments do not integrate the component concept very well and therefore lack in the support of the common development steps when applied to components and component applications. In this paper, we present the HOTAGENT component development environment. Specifically designed as a component development environment that does not exhibit the weaknesses of previous component development environments, HOTAGENT supports the whole development cycle of components and component applications, offering tools to design and develop components and applications, to test components, and to analyze the runtime behavior of component applications. We show how to efficiently use HOTAGENT in all development steps. HOTAGENTS supports the developer with different visual tools that are well integrated with each other.