UML Components: A Simple Process for Specifying Component-Based Software

All too often, design books (and practictioners for that matter) fall into a trap of treating the design process like the desired outcome is "Art", rather than focusing on solving business problems and working within time and budget constraints. This book attacks this notion and presents a process that extends UML to be an effective tool in building distributed component architectures. The focus is on meaningful deliverables that evolve through analysis and design iterations, and the techniques will effectively break you of waterfall habits.

This book has a couple things going for it that make in not only outstanding, but truly unique: 1. It attempts to present an aspect of development in a structured way, without offering it up as some kind of miraculous silver bullet, 2. The literature available on methodology tends to run the gamut from the simplistic (XP) to the baroque (Catalysis). This book makes a compelling argument for a simple process of doing component specification before writing code. We've already introduced many of the concepts into our team and it has made our process much more solid and mature. People are finally waking up to the fact that the future has to be component-based, language or process alone will not deliver us from the throw away world of most modern software. Also, see the book 'Objects, Components and Frameworks in UML: The Catalysis Approach'. It goes well with this, though @ 1200 pages, it is on the baroque side. The influence of Catalysis on the authors (one of them worked on it) is clear.

UML Components, John Chessman and John Daniels successfully collaborate to show how UML applies to the world of component architecture and demonstrating how it can be utilized to specify components, their interactions, and the integration into cohesive systems. UML Components reveals which elements of UML apply to server-side component-based development and how to use them most effectively. The reader is taking carefully and step-by-step through requirements definition, component identification, component interaction, component specification, as well as provisioning and assembly. Numerous UML diagrams and a detailed case study illustrate component specifications, concepts and techniques. UML Components is a very highly recommended, "user friendly" reference for system architects, designers, programmers, and testers.

The book walkthrough a example you can relate with real life. The approach gives a very good overview how a component based architecture can be used in real business applications.