Building Business Objects [With Contains Templates, Lite Business Object, Java...]

This book is an excellant source of information for building application from off the shelf business objects. It describes in detail process of building application and its shortcomings with ability to build application yourself. Also it discusses and details process of building application from off the shelf Business Objects. It is written in very user friendly language and plenty of illustrations.

First of all let me say that I really liked this book... then let me say that I'm having trouble characterizing it. Although the title of the book is "Building Business Objects" the purpose of this book is really to describe something called a business object framework or BOF into which business objects that you write would be plugged. The authors do a great job of describing the requirements for and basic architecture of such a framework. This is the books real value because the requirements and architecture of a general purpose BOF are (part of) the requirements and architecture for a wide variety of distributed object-oriented applications. This is important since to my knowledge there aren't any commercially available BOFs that address all of the issues described in this book (more on that later). So for me at least, this is a book (and a pretty good one) about architecting distributed object-oriented systems. The book is also well written by technical documentation standards.I do however have a few gripes about the book. First of all the authors love acronyms and create upwards of 30 new ones throughout the course of the book. As a result the reader sometimes gets lost. The book also dedicates a couple of chapters to pitch the authors' proprietary framework called BOF Lite (included on the CD-ROM but not enterprise level software). Finally, I really like the architecture proposed by the authors but as the saying goes "the Devil is in the details" and this is where the authors come up a little light. If no commercially available BOF offers all of the features described by the book then I'm still going to need to design and implement some of the infrastructure myself and in that department the book doesn't give me much to go on.OK, up to this point I've mentioned commercially available BOFs so I think in closing I ought to clarify what I mean by that. I don't know if the authors would agree with me but when I'm referring to commercially available BOFs I'm thinking about technologies like Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), or earlier non-object middleware solutions like BEA-Tuxedo. These technologies do not address all of the issues outlined in this book but I think that they are a step in the direction of a BOF and are definitely better than working with raw CORBA or DCOM for most business applications. These technologies are also compatible with the basic architecture described in "Building Business Objects". With this in mind I think a good companion to this book would be one dedicated to using one of these technologies. For example a reasonable hands-on introduction to MTS can be found in "Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0" by Gray and Lievano.

Many object technologists find that the component software paradigm is the most practical way to build, integrate, and deploy object-oriented business systems. However, most practitioners need something more concrete than what's in most of the component theory books that are available and that's where Building Business Objects shines. Those of us who love to (or need to) actually build object-oriented business components will find a lot to like about this book from the extensive use of UML 1.1 diagrams, abundance of business object diagrams and examples, the insightful analysis of it's authors, the up-to-the-minute insider's view of OMG's Business Object Domain Task Force, and its hard-headed, practical advice. Written for those who are concentrating on creating deliverables, the primary focus of this book is to study components at the business level of abstraction instead of low-level object mechanics, and to that end a complete Business Object Facility is provided to construct distributed business objects in a plug-and-play manner. Building Business Objects provides a different angle than most component books in that pragmatic development considerations are given considerable emphasis (such as design policies for application developers and a relentless focus on design considerations and options) as well as technical issues that are critical to business organizations such as transactions, scalability, and security. The Business Object Domain Task Force recently approved the business object standard, so you can expect to see a lot more about OMG Business Objects in the near future and Building Business Objects will become an increasingly important addition to the bookshelf of the serious object technology practitioner.