Define the purpose and function of the component view.
The component view shows the physical arrangement of finished pieces of software. The view contains only one model, the component diagram.

The component diagram may be used for a variety of purposes. It can be used to illustrate subsystems, applications, programs, or databases. In fact, any "chunk" of software that you want to view as a unit may be defined and managed as a component.

In contrast, Java packages are similar but typically have a less rigid definition. Packages are simply groupings of classes with similar characteristics or uses, for instance, the JDK packages java.io and java.lang. Components are usually a group of cooperating classes, and possibly other components that together perform a function.

Components provide the designer with the flexibility to organize and manage software products as reusable units, apart from where and how they might be used. To use a component, developers need not know the internal workings of the component as long as they know the purpose and interfaces of the component.
The goal of OO design is to become increasingly dependent on these components and less dependent on code from scratch. The use of a model for managing these new constructs should have an increasingly important role in software development.
In the next lesson, the deployment view for modeling physical architecture will be discussed.