Very recently, Adaptive Planet (AP), a privately owned company, teamed up with CWI to combine AP's technology, the Activator, with the work done by Dr. Farhad Arbab and his team, Manifold.

In the first part of this talk the Activator technology will be presented. The Acticator is a strict and pure conponent based environment. The basic concepts of this technology grew from the experience gathered from day-to-day IT-problems in large software departments. We learned that ultimate flexibility is key to successful software deployment. This is because most problems in software development and release management result from the real life circumstances a project team has to operate under. The techniques used to develop the software are far less significant. These circumstances not only include commonly known development problems but also much more unexpected release problems. We therefore concluded that it is not the language that is key but rather the environment under which the application executes.

In the second part of this talk, the combination of Manifold and the Activator will be presented. During our years of project experience with the Activator we learned that programming conponents, albeit cleaner, still remains just programming. Moreover, most IT shops really would like to get rid of development altogether. Fortunately, we found out that a significant part of the code served just to make components cooperate. After some in-house experiments with tools that could declare component interaction, we encountered Manifold. We found out that Manifold is the ideal match for the Activator, capable of efficiently describing component interactions.

The capabilities of the combined tool, the Designer, have outgrown the sum of each of its constituents. These perspectives are so huge and promising that the AP/CWI cooperation will be expanded to include other new and exciting features. This glance into the future will be addressed in the third and final part of the talk.