Building Business Objects - Softcover

Eeles, Peter; Sims, Oliver

9780471191766: Building Business Objects

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471191760 ISBN 13: 9780471191766

Publisher: Wiley, 1998

A complete guide to the analysis, design, construction, deployment, and reuse of business objects for your organization.

Business objects are fully interoperable, plug-and-play, distributed components that provide a natural way to depict the things you use in your everyday business processes. With them, you can "evolve" business applications incrementally to fit changing organizational needs, rapidly build new applications entirely from reusable components, and dramatically reduce your development and maintenance costs. Now find out how to put business objects to work for your organization in Building Business Objects.

Written by participating members of the OMG's Business Object Domain Task Force, Building Business Objects reviews the theory behind business objects and business components, and explains how a Business Object Facility (BOF) can augment ORBs such as CORBA and DCOM. The authors then discuss future directions for business-object technology including standards and integration with Java and other Web technologies. Finally, they provide proven techniques for each stage of the business-object development process with numerous real-world examples. Using UML 1.1 throughout, you learn how to:
* Analyze the business domain
* Apply proven design patterns
* Build and utilize your own business objects.

The CD-ROM supplies you with:
* The "BOF Lite" Business Object Facility software
* A library of sample business objects
* The tools to build and use your own simple business objects
* A tutorial in which you construct real business applications.

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Review:

Building Business Objects is an excellent introduction to the theory of business components used on the enterprise, based on emerging OMG standards for distributed objects. Suitable for the working designer or IS manager, this title offers a valuable vendor-independent guide to the power of business objects.

The principal strength of this text is its introduction to the theory and practice of business objects created with a modeling tool (included on the accompanying CD-ROM) called the Business Object Facility (BOF) Light. The authors first contrast traditional application architecture with the brave new world of applications written with distributed objects. In a series of simple, effective exercises, which can be done by virtually anyone (even without programming expertise), the authors work to create simple business objects needed for a car rental and apartment rental application. They also introduce UML basics for modeling classes. They avoid committing to CORBA or DCOM as technology platforms (though later chapters describe BOF in terms of CORBA services, including support for naming, transactions, and events). A later chapter looks at the advantages of business objects for Internet applications.

By avoiding the CORBA vs. DCOM vendor war, this book achieves a balanced view of component design that will be appreciated by any manager or developer who wants the "big picture" about the advantages of business objects for reuse and reliability. While some of the details here are already a year old (such as the description of the older Java 1.1 standard), this book is still a useful choice for any IS manager or designer who wants a perspective on today's distributed objects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: OMG business objects and UML basics, business processes, analysis, design, distributed components, Business Object Facility (BOF) basics, Business Object User Interfaces (BOUIs), BOF services, transactions and events, CORBA, DCOM, business objects on the Web (and Java), and BOF Lite (a modeling tool).

From the Publisher:

Business Objects offer an efficient and natural method of capturing everyday business transactions, including customer profiles, inventory, and order taking. The OMG (Object Management Group) is now establishing standards for Business Objects drafted by Oliver Sims and Peter Eeles. This book outlines the specification that the OMG will adopt, and describes how to design Business Objects for new or existing applications. The interaction of Business Objects with CORBA is also discussed. Hncludes CD-ROM with... Templates for ready-to-use Business Objects. * NEWI (New World Infrastructure) Business Object Software. * Sample source code found in the book.

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