The component broker is the central piece of YaST. It acts as a dispatcher for all other components: When a (YCP, Perl or whatever) script calls a function, the broker determines what component handles that function call based on the respective namespace identifier. It is transparent to the caller what programming language a function is written in; the component broker handles that kind of dispatching. The caller only needs to know the function name, its namespace and (or course) the required parameters.

For example, calls like UI::OpenDialog() go to the UI (the user interface), SCR::Read() to the SCR (the system configuration repository). Even scripts can provide namespaces via modules in YCP or Perl.

All communication between the different parts of YaST core is done via a predefined set of YCP data types - simple data types like string, integer, boolean etc., but also compound data types like maps (key / value pairs, also known as "hashes" in other programming languages) or lists (like arrays or vectors in other programming languages). For complex data structures, maps, lists and simple data types can be nested to any degree.