Agora: A Search Engine for Software Components

Agora is a software prototype being developed by the Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS)-Based Systems Initiative at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The object of this work is to create an automatically generated and indexed worldwide database of software products classified by component model. Agora combines introspection with Web search engines to reduce the costs of bring software to, and finding components in, the software marketplace. This report describes Agora's role in an emerging component industry and the features and capabilities provided by Agora. The implementations of a JavaBeans agent and a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) agent are also described. These agents are used to gather components of their respective types.