Business Components Factory

by Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471327603
• ISBN13: 9780471327608
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 579 Pages
• Weight: 2.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 7.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Dispelling Myths, Doing it Right

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.

An excellent guide to successful adoption of Enterprise CBD

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).

One of the most important books I've read in the last 10 yea

There are a lot of books out there that discuss component-based development, but this is the first book I've read that details a complete methodology for making CBD work in the real world.Many of the principles discussed in the book are either common-sense best practices, or have been covered by other authors in the past. This book, however, ties together a wide range of process and architectural concepts into a complete blueprint for creating a rapid component and application development "factory". As the authors point out repeatedly throughout the book, many of their requirements for a true component factory do not yet exist in commercially available products. However all their recommendations have been derived from the real-world experience of Peter Herzum and his team creating such a factory. Most of the material is highly applicable today, and it also provides a glimpse into what the rapid development of business systems will be like as the technological infrastructure matures over the next decade.This book has already had a profound impact on my thinking regarding large scale business systems development, and I know that I will be referring to it for years to come.The bottom line - if you're interested or involved in component-based development, read this book!

An excellent reference book

What a great book! Now that I am finally done with it...Apart from its length (but I guess that it is impossible to treat all these subjects appropriately in a shorter book), this is my favorite book in a long time. It addresses a lot of the issues that we have had to resolve in large-scale distributed system development, and provides a great conceptual framework for placing the solutions to these issues. In an era of hype and "rapid development", this book was refreshing in its addressing the complexities and approaches required to succeed in developing distributed systems using component thinking.I believe that professionals experts in distributed system development will recognize many of the practices, design principles, approaches, and simple common sense that they have applied in the past, but formalized, clearly explained, and situated inside a whole approach that is component-based from beginning to end. Professionals that have not years of expertise in this complex field will find here a wealth of information about what works and what does not work. The aspects that I found most interesting:- The idea of a component as a very comprehensive concept going through the development lifecycle and the distribution tiers. At first, this seemed strange, but I can see now how this resolves many of the issues we had problems with.- The clear architectural framework and layering, and also the related seven layers interoperability protocol model in chapter 6. This too, at the beginning seemed just common sense, but I find myself referring to it more and more in my day-to-day work. The point is that we were trying to apply similar principles, but without a clear formalization of it. There are other architectural frameworks described in the literature, including RM-ODP, but this strikes me as particularly appropriate for distributed system development. - The distinction between the distributed object mindset and the component-based mindset. Having been working with EJBs and DCOM, it is clear that the model these technologies suggest as default is not the most appropriate for scalable systems. This books explains why, and also how to use these technologies appropriately.- The weight and importance given to the project management architecture (even just the fact of considering this an architectural viewpoint)- The approach to persistence. It is similar to what other authors describe (for example, Scott Ambler), but placed in the context of component-based development for the enterprise.I highly recommend this book. I find myself referencing this book often.

THE book to read to understand components

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. TransitioningWhen 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 t