O que é um componente?

• “A software package which offers service through interfaces”
  
  •[Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims, “Business Components Factory: A Comprehensive Overview of Component-Based Development for the Enterprise”, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 1999].
   

• •“A coherent package of software artifacts that can be independently developed and delivered as a unit and that can be composed, unchanged, with other components to build something larger”
  
  •[D.F. D’Souza and A.C. Wills, “Objects, Components, And Frameworks with UML – The Catalysis Approach” Addison-Wesley, 1998].
   
• •“A component is a unit of composition with contractually specified interfaces and explicit context dependencies only. A software component can be deployed independently and is subject to composition by third parties.”
  
  [C. Szyperski, “Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming” Addison-Wesley, 1998].