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Introduction

In Loom, there are three component layers:

• Blocks
• Components
• Classes

These represent ever narrowing views of a component based architecture. The best analogy is that of hardware. In the PC world, a block would be like a PCI card, a Motherboard, a Case, or a Hard Drive. A component would be like the chips on the cards, and a class would be like the individual transistor on the chip. Granted, the actual economies of scale in this analogy don't hold to software (a component will not have millions of classes).

What is a Block?

A Block is a Component on a larger scale. It is usually the implementation of a Service. Examples of Blocks are "Persistent Object Store", "Connection Pools", "XML Database", "Authenticator" and so on.