SOF (Service Oriented Framework) wants to help software developers to avoid developing monolithic software. The SOF framework allows to separate a software system in several small components which are communicating via clearly defined interfaces. Components can be started and stopped at runtime and the components are notified about the lifecycle of other components if necessary. SOF is implemented in standard C++ and provides an OS independent framework for developing component based software. The SOF API is very similar to the OSGI API (see OSGI).