It is argued that to say that "any ICT application worthy of the name" must be pedagogically driven (Nicholson & Mulhern, 2001, p.149) is too strong a statement, inasmuch as CALL system architecture holds issues not only for language learners but also development of CALL as a research discipline.
A system as Sunderland University illustrates the benefits for CALL and for teachers introducing Educational Technology in their language programmes. The theoretical advantages of reusable and distributed component-based architecture on a client/server system are outlined, and some practical code example taken from the Sunderland Project demonstrate simple techniques for putting theory into practice. Some further distributed applications technologies not used in the system are also described.