Cheap Business Component Factory : A Comprehensive Overview of Component-Based Development for the Enterprise (Book) (Peter Herzum, Oliver Sims) Price

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Customer Reviews of Business Component Factory : A Comprehensive Overview of Component-Based Development for the Enterprise

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).

Good information, but not all that new.
One of the things I've noticed over the years is that many books on computer - related topics tend to recycle a lot of concepts; it sometimes makes me wonder if there is ever anything new in the world of software engineering. For example, for a while now, we've been reading a lot of philosophy and techniques about object-oriented programming. Good stuff, but not all that different from what good designers and programmers were already doing years before. Well, in this book the "objects" get bigger, and they're described with different words. Something about this recycling process which is a particular irritant to me is that the people who write these books seem to feel the need to invent new words (or assign new meanings to old words). I've always thought that the purpose of language is to communicate -- reassigning word meanings is not something I find helpful. Who, for example, ever heard of "process management architecture"?

Much of the material in this book is stuff you've seen before -- the words are different or they're used with different meanings or in new contexts -- but a lot of the concepts are familiar. The book does expand its scope somewhat to cover much more of the "development process", resulting in more of a mix of technical and process information than is typical. This is good, as all too often we tend to separate the technology from the process.

Bottom line: Useful information. Nothing particularly new or revolutionary. Could have been a couple of hundred pages shorter. I frequently found myself needing to re-read something or refer to the glossary to re-discover a definition.

Full lifecycle view, business advatage to large grain CBD
Herzum and Sims have taken a brave approach to components, emphasizing the view of components through the development lifecycle, where the same component exists from requirements through design to implementation, with only a different view on it. They do a good job of completing the lifecycle with project management aspects of component development as well.

The book seems high level, but they enter into a lot of technical detail as well, while not getting involved in a specific technology. The book is used by me as a textbook for graduate students, as it covers all aspects in detail but generically.

The advantage of the book is the way in which components are defined. Business Components are large grained, made up of many parts which they define in layers. This leads to a wider view of the concept, and leads to a re-organization of the development process.

The book is structured around an architecture for development, which establishes a production-line approach. This ensures the component concept is bought into throughout the organization.

This is the only book to focus on large grained components, with a pure business advantage, but explained technically. This is and is not a how to book. It is a roadmap for what to do and how to arrange it, but not the specific technology to use.

There is a lot of detail in this thick book, but it is easy to read. Very unique approach, and the only book describing aspects you will not learn elsewhere. Other books only describe the overall concept. This one tells you exactly how to fit it into your organization, down to how to structure teams! The book is very comprehansive, and really does follow the development lifecycle. You will gain knowledge of : components on a business level, a new lifecycle for development that is very tailored to components in business, techniques for developing systems, from individual components to integrating federations of components form third parties, all the other aspects thinner books leave out.