The technical foundation has been established with the aforementioned component models, but the need for understanding how to build and use business components has grown immensely. Business Component Factory , by Peter Herzum and Oliver Sims, is a book that can help satisfying this need. 

The title "Business Component Factory" might sound a bit misleading, especially for IT specialists familiar with the design pattern known as the factory pattern. In this book, however, the term has a completely different meaning. It is used in order to point out that the book is not only about business components in general but also about the development process and the techniques that allow to produce business components. The book addresses these different aspects by devoting major sections to each of the aspects. It contains three parts: 

Conceptual Framework (240 pages)
This part explains business component systems and how they relate distributed components. In general, the book does not delve deeply into the technical details of any concrete component model. Compared to the other parts of the book, this is the most technical, or let's say architectural, part. It is published in Wiley's OMG series; for this reason one might it to focus on CORBA Components as a foundation for business objects. This is not the case. Instead, it coins the expression "distributed component"?an abstraction that could be any type of business component foundation?and devotes a chapter of around 35 pages to the discussion of the typical functionality and characteristics of a distributed component in general. Based on this discussion it examines business components built on top of distributed components and business component systems constructed from business components. 

Component Factory Setup (180 pages)
This part of the book focuses on the development process for business components and the three views?or "architectures" as they are called in the book?that are essential for a successful project. After a chapter that discusses the process for business component development, each of the three architectures is discussed: technical architecture, application architecture, and project management architecture. The authors discuss issues relevant to each of the three architecture. The chapter about technical architecture, for example, looks at topics such as concurrency, asynchronous messaging, transactions, persistence, error handling, etc. 

Manufacturing Component-Based Software (130 pages)
The last part of the book contains three chapters. The first two discuss the concrete modeling and design techniques for a business-component-based system: one chapter is devoted to the modeling of the business domain and one to the design of the solution domain. 

The book closes with a chapter on the possibilities and challenges for a transition from today's classic software development to a "business component factory," as described in the book. 

In sum, Business Component Factory contains a lot of knowledge and information about business components and the process and techniques for finding, implementing, and using them. 

How does this book relate to other titles on components? For complete coverage of component technology you need only three books: 

• A book like Component Software by Clemens Szyperski, which explains the foundation of component technology and its relationship to object orientation
• This book, Business Component Factory , for understanding the development process for component-based software development
• A book about the technical aspects of the component model under consideration (pick any one of them; there is an abundance of titles on EJB, MTS, and CORBA Components) 

Angelika Langer develops and teaches classes on Java, C++, multithreading, and internationalization. She is an internationally recognized speaker and served on the ANSI/ISO C++ Committee from 1993 to 1998. Klaus Kreft is a software architect and senior consultant with 15+ years of experience in industrial software development. He currently works for Siemens Business Services in Germany. Langer and Kreft are authors of "Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales" (Addison-Wesley, 2000) and are columnists for the C/C++ Users Journal.