Building Business Objects [Paperback]

Peter Eeles (Author), Oliver Sims (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471191760 | ISBN-13: 978-0471191766 | Publication Date: March 30, 1998

A complete guide to the analysis, design, construction, deployment, and reuse of business objects for your organization.

Business objects are fully interoperable, plug-and-play, distributed components that provide a natural way to depict the things you use in your everyday business processes. With them, you can "evolve" business applications incrementally to fit changing organizational needs, rapidly build new applications entirely from reusable components, and dramatically reduce your development and maintenance costs. Now find out how to put business objects to work for your organization in Building Business Objects.

Written by participating members of the OMG's Business Object Domain Task Force, Building Business Objects reviews the theory behind business objects and business components, and explains how a Business Object Facility (BOF) can augment ORBs such as CORBA and DCOM. The authors then discuss future directions for business-object technology including standards and integration with Java and other Web technologies. Finally, they provide proven techniques for each stage of the business-object development process with numerous real-world examples. Using UML 1.1 throughout, you learn how to:
* Analyze the business domain
* Apply proven design patterns
* Build and utilize your own business objects.

The CD-ROM supplies you with:
* The "BOF Lite" Business Object Facility software
* A library of sample business objects
* The tools to build and use your own simple business objects
* A tutorial in which you construct real business applications.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Building Business Objects is an excellent introduction to the theory of business components used on the enterprise, based on emerging OMG standards for distributed objects. Suitable for the working designer or IS manager, this title offers a valuable vendor-independent guide to the power of business objects.

The principal strength of this text is its introduction to the theory and practice of business objects created with a modeling tool (included on the accompanying CD-ROM) called the Business Object Facility (BOF) Light. The authors first contrast traditional application architecture with the brave new world of applications written with distributed objects. In a series of simple, effective exercises, which can be done by virtually anyone (even without programming expertise), the authors work to create simple business objects needed for a car rental and apartment rental application. They also introduce UML basics for modeling classes. They avoid committing to CORBA or DCOM as technology platforms (though later chapters describe BOF in terms of CORBA services, including support for naming, transactions, and events). A later chapter looks at the advantages of business objects for Internet applications.

By avoiding the CORBA vs. DCOM vendor war, this book achieves a balanced view of component design that will be appreciated by any manager or developer who wants the "big picture" about the advantages of business objects for reuse and reliability. While some of the details here are already a year old (such as the description of the older Java 1.1 standard), this book is still a useful choice for any IS manager or designer who wants a perspective on today's distributed objects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: OMG business objects and UML basics, business processes, analysis, design, distributed components, Business Object Facility (BOF) basics, Business Object User Interfaces (BOUIs), BOF services, transactions and events, CORBA, DCOM, business objects on the Web (and Java), and BOF Lite (a modeling tool).

From the Publisher

Business Objects offer an efficient and natural method of capturing everyday business transactions, including customer profiles, inventory, and order taking. The OMG (Object Management Group) is now establishing standards for Business Objects drafted by Oliver Sims and Peter Eeles. This book outlines the specification that the OMG will adopt, and describes how to design Business Objects for new or existing applications. The interaction of Business Objects with CORBA is also discussed. Hncludes CD-ROM with... Templates for ready-to-use Business Objects. * NEWI (New World Infrastructure) Business Object Software. * Sample source code found in the book.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (March 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471191760
• ISBN-13: 978-0471191766
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,388,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for architects of distributed object-oriented apps, May 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Building Business Objects (Paperback)

First of all let me say that I really liked this book... then let me say that I'm having trouble characterizing it. Although the title of the book is "Building Business Objects" the purpose of this book is really to describe something called a business object framework or BOF into which business objects that you write would be plugged. The authors do a great job of describing the requirements for and basic architecture of such a framework. This is the books real value because the requirements and architecture of a general purpose BOF are (part of) the requirements and architecture for a wide variety of distributed object-oriented applications. This is important since to my knowledge there aren't any commercially available BOFs that address all of the issues described in this book (more on that later). So for me at least, this is a book (and a pretty good one) about architecting distributed object-oriented systems. The book is also well written by technical documentation standards.

I do however have a few gripes about the book. First of all the authors love acronyms and create upwards of 30 new ones throughout the course of the book. As a result the reader sometimes gets lost. The book also dedicates a couple of chapters to pitch the authors' proprietary framework called BOF Lite (included on the CD-ROM but not enterprise level software). Finally, I really like the architecture proposed by the authors but as the saying goes "the Devil is in the details" and this is where the authors come up a little light. If no commercially available BOF offers all of the features described by the book then I'm still going to need to design and implement some of the infrastructure myself and in that department the book doesn't give me much to go on.

OK, up to this point I've mentioned commercially available BOFs so I think in closing I ought to clarify what I mean by that. I don't know if the authors would agree with me but when I'm referring to commercially available BOFs I'm thinking about technologies like Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), or earlier non-object middleware solutions like BEA-Tuxedo. These technologies do not address all of the issues outlined in this book but I think that they are a step in the direction of a BOF and are definitely better than working with raw CORBA or DCOM for most business applications. These technologies are also compatible with the basic architecture described in "Building Business Objects". With this in mind I think a good companion to this book would be one dedicated to using one of these technologies. For example a reasonable hands-on introduction to MTS can be found in "Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0" by Gray and Lievano.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important addition to the bookshelf., March 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Building Business Objects (Paperback)

Many object technologists find that the component software paradigm is the most practical way to build, integrate, and deploy object-oriented business systems. However, most practitioners need something more concrete than what's in most of the component theory books that are available and that's where Building Business Objects shines. Those of us who love to (or need to) actually build object-oriented business components will find a lot to like about this book from the extensive use of UML 1.1 diagrams, abundance of business object diagrams and examples, the insightful analysis of it's authors, the up-to-the-minute insider's view of OMG's Business Object Domain Task Force, and its hard-headed, practical advice. Written for those who are concentrating on creating deliverables, the primary focus of this book is to study components at the business level of abstraction instead of low-level object mechanics, and to that end a complete Business Object Facility is provided to construct distributed business objects in a plug-and-play manner. Building Business Objects provides a different angle than most component books in that pragmatic development considerations are given considerable emphasis (such as design policies for application developers and a relentless focus on design considerations and options) as well as technical issues that are critical to business organizations such as transactions, scalability, and security. The Business Object Domain Task Force recently approved the business object standard, so you can expect to see a lot more about OMG Business Objects in the near future and Building Business Objects will become an increasingly important addition to the bookshelf of the serious object technology practitioner.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gem for application Development, December 10, 2001

By 

Mahendra Ashar (Danbury, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building Business Objects (Paperback)

This book is an excellant source of information for building application from off the shelf business objects. It describes in detail process of building application and its shortcomings with ability to build application yourself. Also it discusses and details process of building application from off the shelf Business Objects. It is written in very user friendly language and plenty of illustrations.