Software architectures have gained wide popularity in the last decade. They generally play a fundamental role in coping with the inherent difficulties of the development of large-scale and complex software systems. Component-oriented and aspect-oriented programming enables software engineers to implement complex applications from a set of pre-defined components. Software Architectures and Component Technology collects excellent chapters on software architectures and component technologies from well-known authors, who not only explain the advantages, but also present the shortcomings of the current approaches while introducing novel solutions to overcome the shortcomings. The unique features of this book are: evaluates the current architecture design methods and component composition techniques and explains their shortcomings; presents three practical architecture design methods in detail; gives four industrial architecture design examples; presents conceptual models for distributed message-based architectures; explains techniques for refining architectures into components; presents the recent developments in component and aspect-oriented techniques; explains the status of research on Piccola, Hyper/J®, Pluggable Composite Adapters and Composition Filters. Software Architectures and Component Technology is a suitable text for graduate level students in computer science and engineering, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.