Business Component Factory: A Comprehensive Overview of Component-Based Development for the Enterprise (OMG) [Kindle Edition]

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.

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).

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!