The principal impediment to achieving interoperability, modifiability, implementation-independence and the reuse of object-oriented software components is the strong coupling between objects. The preferred solution to this problem involves adding an output port to each object and further making this additional output port part of a new software development approach that is an extension of the object-orientation paradigm. The resulting component-oriented software development environment provides the level of indirect addressing that is needed to manage the design requirements of interoperability, modifiability and implementation-independency. The approach described is superior to the component-oriented approach used in some of the Microsoft Corporation's software applications and the applet approach recently advocated for the Java programming language. Another solution to the decoupling problem includes requiring each object to address other objects only indirectly, such as by using specific interface objects. Several variants of this technique have been detailed, described and compared in this patent application. Each of these techniques may be applied in different parts, or at different levels, of a software system.