Much of the software engineering literature examines techniques and practices that help us to build systems that we have been building for many years already. While there is merit in seeking ways to raise the floor of software engineering practice, we also have an obligation to research software design issues that push the envelope of existing computing technology. One of the features of future interactive computing environments is that they will provide context-aware services that leverage off of knowledge of a person's physical state and surrounding environment. With the proliferation of network-based computing services that are a characteristic of an emerging ubiquitous computing society, there is a real issue with providing a software infrastructure that will support context-aware services. In this paper, we examine software engineering work on component integration and introduce a prototype infrastructure that provides a dynamic and scalable context-aware computing environment. We will describe how we have applied this component infrastructure to build a futuristic personal information management system involving automatic cooperation between desktop, network and mobile services
