There has been a flurry of activity in recent years to extend existing languages with object-oriented features, and to extend object-oriented concepts and languages with seemingly orthogonal features, such as concurrency and persistence, to improve their expressive power and potential as a solution to the "software crisis". In many cases these integration efforts have uncovered various forms of semantic interference between features. We claim that the majority of these difficulties are concerned with the very aspect of object-orientation that we seek most urgently to exploit, namely software compositionality. We shall review the problems of integrating concurrency and object-oriented features from this viewpoint and discuss some of the more important requirements to be met. Finally, we propose a view of objects as patterns of communicating agents that suggests the development of a class of concurent object-oriented languages parameterized by patterns that address the needs of particular application domains.