Business Component Factory : A Comprehensive Overview of Component-Based Development for the Enterprise (Hardcover)

by Peter Herzum (Author), Oliver Sims (Author) "can be treated as atomic units and can easily be made to cooperate with each other. This leads the organization to an intuition about the..." (more)
Key Phrases: business component approach, business component system, component implementation technology, Invoice Vendor, Component-Based Business Modeling, John Smith (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In this book, Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims present a complete component based strategy, the business component approach, that applies and extends component thinking to all aspects of the software life cycle for enterprise systems. The approach includes a conceptual framework that brings components into the world of scalable systems, and outlines the different component granularities.

It also includes a methodology that goes beyond current object-oriented practices to provide the concepts required to meet the real challenges of component-based development. Using their business component approach, the authors then provide a blueprint for a business component factory--a development capability that can produce software with the quality, speed, and flexibility needed to match changing business needs. Sprinkled with guidelines, tips, and architectural patterns, this book fully prepares you for the approaching component revolution.

Praise for Business Component Factory

". . . this book should be very useful for anyone considering the daunting task of adopting component software on an enterprise scale."-Clemens Szyperski (Microsoft Research), Author of the award-winning book, Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming

"Herzum and Sims do an admirable job of differentiating the different component concepts, allowing this clearly written book to focus on the construction of business systems by non-software practitioners, out of business component parts developed separately (and perhaps for a commodity component marketplace). This is the future of software systems, and this book is a practical, giant step in that direction."-Richard Mark Soley, PhD,Chairman and CEO, OMG

"Finally, a book that takes you from component design all the way down to the middleware on which they are deployed. ItÕs an important contribution to the nascent server-side component discipline written by practitioners for practitioners."-Robert Orfali, Author of Client/Server Survival Guide, Third Edition and Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA, Second Edition (both from Wiley)

From the Back Cover
In this book, Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims present a complete component based strategy, the business component approach, that applies and extends component thinking to all aspects of the software life cycle for enterprise systems. The approach includes a conceptual framework that brings components into the world of scalable systems, and outlines the different component granularities.

It also includes a methodology that goes beyond current object-oriented practices to provide the concepts required to meet the real challenges of component-based development. Using their business component approach, the authors then provide a blueprint for a business component factory--a development capability that can produce software with the quality, speed, and flexibility needed to match changing business needs. Sprinkled with guidelines, tips, and architectural patterns, this book fully prepares you for the approaching component revolution.

Praise for Business Component Factory

". . . this book should be very useful for anyone considering the daunting task of adopting component software on an enterprise scale."-Clemens Szyperski (Microsoft Research), Author of the award-winning book, Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming

"Herzum and Sims do an admirable job of differentiating the different component concepts, allowing this clearly written book to focus on the construction of business systems by non-software practitioners, out of business component parts developed separately (and perhaps for a commodity component marketplace). This is the future of software systems, and this book is a practical, giant step in that direction."-Richard Mark Soley, PhD,Chairman and CEO, OMG

"Finally, a book that takes you from component design all the way down to the middleware on which they are deployed. It?s an important contribution to the nascent server-side component discipline written by practitioners for practitioners."-Robert Orfali, Author of Client/Server Survival Guide, Third Edition and Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA, Second Edition (both from Wiley)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471327603
• ISBN-13: 978-0471327608
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #959,978 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent guide to successful adoption of Enterprise CBD, May 29, 2000

By	Mark S Potts (Perth, Australia) - See all my reviews

This book is the first I have read that really tackles all aspects of what is required for Enterprise Application Development through a CBD approach.

By defining the levels of component granularity and a recursively discrete approach to breaking a business problem down into components and their constituents as finer grained components, the true requirements for CBD are evident and determined. Many books I have read make the same mistake of only discussing development of components at one level (usually what Herzum defines as the distributed component level) and fail to address the many of the aspects of CBD that are not covered by development alone (deployment, testing, management, integration, and a roadmap for the development process and managment of that process through to delivery of a component based system). The book also talks and applies the component levels to the commonly depicted 4 tier architecture and importantly introduces the concept of components needing to be not only strongly typed for internal systems but also strongly tagged (supporting XML based component messaging/invocation) for virtual and extended systems. The coverage of what is required from a Component Execution Environment (CEE) when components are more course grained than simple distributed components is well covered and continues to define the true requirements for a Business Component Execution Environment (BCVM).

The book is a must read for anyone serious about adopting CBD on and enterprise scale. The book goes well beyond the common text available for CBD (that all concentrate on the short sighted development requirements for distributed components in a fine grained component containment model). I agree with another reviewer that for those of us that have been developing systems in EJB, COM+/DCOM and CORBA much of the book covers lessons we have painfully had to learn in developing multiple component based systems that have to inter-operate, but it goes beyond that in looking at what is necessary for component based systems at the next architectural level (one that may well incorporate disparate distributed component models).

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dispelling Myths, Doing it Right, August 1, 2000

By	James R. McElroy "[e-mail]" (Magalia, CA USA) - See all my reviews

As an OO practitioner and methodologist for the last 10 years, I found the Herzum / Sims book to be right on the money in several regards.

OO has a lot of theoretical ideas which just don't seem to pan out in practice. The Business Component Factory cleary explains why, and shows what really works in the true industrial setting. It is rich in practical advise, and low in BS. Very refreshing for the software practitioner who is frustrated by the OO theoreticians who spout their wisdom from the ivory towers, but have rarely, if ever, had to work on real projects.

Along these lines, the BCF book dispels the OO myth that all classes / objects must be as intelligent as possible, and admits that, in reality, it is often best to have "focus" classes. These classes contain the intelligence of a group of related classes (grouped in a component) and give the advantage of lower coupling for the other classes, and of providing a focus target for process and use case modeling. Hence, Herzum / Sims tie the use case models effectively to classes, then to components.

The BCF book also points out that components need to be "first class citizens" in the UML metamodel, which map from analysis through design into code. As the UML currently stands, packages and (UML-style) components fail miserably in this area. Herzum / Sims show how to get around this deficiency and model and produce large-scale software units (components) effectively.

There is much more to the book than described above, but the above two points emphasize that the BCF book is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom (even the sacred UML), to point out flaws in this "wisdom", and to discuss what really works. Highly recommended, especially for anyone working on large-scale system development.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE book to read to understand components, January 28, 2000

By	Paul Harmon (USA) - See all my reviews

Components have become a hot topic for a couple of years now, but until recently there has been no really good book to recommend to people who want to learn more about the topic. ... This deficiency has now been handsomely overcome with the publication of Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims new book.

I recommend this book without any qualification: This is THE book to read to understand components and the impact of components on enterprise application development. Everyone involved in architecting enterprise applications or developing component-based applications will want to read this book.

A high-level table of contents will provide a good overview to the scope of this book:

1. Component-Based Development 2. The Business Component Approach 3. The Distributed Component 4. The Business Component 5. The Business Component System 6. The Federation of System-Level Components 7. Development Process 8. Technical Architecture 9. Application Architecture 10. The Project Management Architecture 11. Component-Based Modeling 12. Component-Based Design 13. Transitioning

When you consider that, for the past year, we have had technologies like MTS and Enterprise JavaBeans, which provide delivery systems for server-size business components, but no general description of what a business component is, or how one might go about developing an enterprise application, you realize how important Business Component Factory will be. This is the book that is going to introduce the upcoming generation of software developers to the concepts that we are going to rely on as we develop enterprise applications in the next decade.

Herzum and Sims define a business component as follows: "A business component is the software implementation of an autonomous business concept or business process. It consists of all of the software artifacts necessary to represent, implement, and deploy a given business concept as an autonomous, reusable element of a larger distributed information system."

Those familiar with the move toward business components will probably find this definition unexceptional. What they will be more surprised with, however, is how Herzum and Sims proceed to extend this definition into a precise description. They define a business component, for example, as incorporating a three or multi-tier distributed system within itself. Thus, a business component is made up of other components that fall into four groups: User Interface components, Workspace components that marshal information on the client, enterprise components that contain business logic and reside on the server, and resource components that manage legacy or database resources. They proceed to define each carefully, work out how one approaches developing such components and what roles they play in various architectural views.

I haven't the space to pursue the development of Herzum and Sims concepts here. Meantime, however, you owe it to yourself to acquire and read this book.