Customer Reviews

Foundations of Component-Based Systems

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This book is an excellent secondary companion to "Component Based Software Engineering" by Heineman and Councill. It is a secondary text for practitioners and academics that will provide insights into a narrow slice of component-based software engineering issues.

Organization is a collection of papers that are grouped in four sections:

(1) Frameworks and Architectures. Consists of four papers of which I particularly liked Key Concepts in Architecture Definition Languages and Acme: Architectural Description of Component-Based Systems because of professional interests in ADLs.

(2) Object-Based Specification and Verification. The three papers in this section were focused on narrow topics; however, I gained much from Modular Specification and Verification Techniques for Object-Oriented Software Components. This paper alone made the book worthwhile to me, but this is a subjective remark with which you may not agree.

(3) Formal Methods and Semantics. Each of the three papers in this section were, in my opinion, valuable. My favorite, Toward a Normative Theory for Component-Based System Design and Analysis, contained a viable framework and approach to component design, which is a topic that receives little coverage in other component-based books.

(4) Reactive and Distributed Systems. The two papers in this section are interesting in that their topics intersect nicely with the discipline of semantic web engineering. If your interests or work also includes that knowledge area then the papers (Composition of Reactive System Components and Using I/O Automata for Developing Distributed Systems)will 'connect the dots' in a manner of speaking.

Much of the material in this book is academic and/or theoretical, but is backed up with results from projects and supporting project data. What I like most is that the material uses tools and technologies that are hot topics, such as UML, EJB and COM.