We have defined that components are made up of runnable binaries. And that components can depend upon each other. Applications depend upon components as well. You can think of components being the building blocks to making an application. It is a matter of packaging the right components together to make an application run and function. This packaging can include not only binary components, exes and dlls but also database components (table changes, indexes etc).
When you create an Application in Release Engineer, you are defining everything that that application needs to run, binaries, config files, properties, and database components. We then can deploy the application which in turn deploys all of the components that the application consumes. Release Engineer then drills down into the components and sends those binaries and database changes to the right servers.
Also, in Release Engineer you can have applications that need to released at the same time, but thats topic is for another post.
