The Components reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004
(provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Components

For thoughtful child sponsors
In computer science, components are basic functional units of a program which allow for rapid development. They usually have simple interfaces which allow the programmer to do powerful things without having to worry about the complexities of implementing the component's functionality.

Pre-packaged components (for Delphi or Java, for example) can be purchased or downloaded for free.

A standard way to implement a component is as a class object (object-oriented programming).