The component-based software reuse and development is considered as an effective and efficient approach to improve the productivity and quality of software development, and is applied widely in building distributed systems. But, current software component technologies are concentrating mostly on component implementation models and runtime interoperability, lacking systematic approach to guide the whole development process. Recently, the research on software architecture (SA) has made significant progress, which takes components as fundamental units and provides a top-down approach to component-oriented development by describing the gross structure and features of software systems. In this paper, an SA-based component-oriented development approach is proposed, trying to offer an effective systematic solution for component-based reuse. This approach introduces the software architecture into each phase of software lifecycle, takes SA as the blueprint of system development, shortens the gap between high-level design and implementation by toolkit support, and realizes the automated system composition on runtime component underpinning platforms.