Component-based reuse is a hopeful solution to the software crisis. Research on software architecture (SA) has revealed a component-based vision of the gross structure of software and provides a top-down approach to direct the component-oriented development process. But the gap between SA design and final implementation prevents it from playing a fundamental role in the process. On the other hand, the component-based software development (CBSD) technology such as Java 2 platform enterprise edition (J2EE) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) provides a feasible bottom-up way to construct systems from standard components, forming an implementation basis for an integrated component-oriented development process. In this paper, we propose an architecture-based component composition (ABC) approach, which uses SA model as the blueprint of development and COTS middleware as the run-time platform to support an automated component-oriented development process.