1. Introduction

The problems occurring when a company starts to establish mechanisms to realize software reuse are well known. The RSB-Project aims overcome some of these problems with a cooperative approach.

The REGINA Software Library project (RSB for the German term REGINA Software Bibliothek) takes place in cooperation between the Department of Computer Science III of the Aachen University of Technology (RWTH Aachen) and the REGINA (Regionaler Industrie-Club Informatik Aachen e.V.)

REGINA is an association of thirty software producing companies and ten departments and research institutes in the Aachen area. It was established with the main goal to improve members competitiveness on the market of software development and to encourage regional contacts. Means to reach these goals are working groups on current topics and other institutions on different levels to support exchange of ideas and experiences.

The RSB-Project is a further approach to support cooperation and to solve a major problem of the participating companies: the lack of (knowledge about) reusable software.

The project started in 1995 and will last three years. Nine industrial partners which are software producing organizations and members of REGINA are participating. The project, which is sponsored by two German Ministries (Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Mittelstand, Technologie und Verkehr des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen - MWMTV and Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung des Landes NRW - MWF), is scientifically supported by the Department of Computer Science III of RWTH Aachen.

The first idea to support cooperative software reuse was to create a common software library. This approach failed, unfortunalety. However, the activities performed in this context were not for nothing. On the contrary, in turned out that a small free common class library is not as important as assumed. Instead, comprehensive information about software components which could be (re-)used to save time and efforts for a new development, are much more important. By software components (also called reusable assets) we mean commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) but also public domain software or shareware which may be provided by project participants or by other producers.

Thus, the project deals with the goals, the problems, and the results of our second approach: an Internet-based software component information system (SCIS) supporting development with reuse in different ways in a consortium of different companies. The requirements and concepts of the system where analyzed and the functionality was specified. The aim is to demonstrate how the World Wide Web, the Internet, and corresponding protocols support software reuse in this context and how Internet services may be used to find new products. The software we use is a relational database (Oracle 7.3 workgroup server) and an Oracle WebServer on Windows NT.

A software classification schema was developed which is used as the basis for dynamic generation of HTML forms as well as for the storage of component data. Additionally, by using a metaschema this approach takes into account the need to extend and change software classification schemas, since their maintainance is a never ending process. Until now, the main parts of the SCIS have been implemented. The test phase of the SCIS started off in September 1997 with the "Stapellauf".

We investigated the possibilities using Java Client/Server technologies to develop user-friendly graphical user interfaces on the basis of RMI and JDBC. The most complex user-interface, the tool used by the administrator for changing the software classification schema was first implemented using 2-tier and 3-tier approaches. Currently we are implementing a 2-tier-approach to facilitate the navigation-process in the classification schema and the search of software components which have to match several fixed attributes.

You can visit our Software Component Information System at http://www.findcomponents.com. All use is free!
A slightly different description of the project can be found at http://www.findcomponents.com/Project.html#Description