Component-based development: principles and planning for business systems was a pleasant surprise. Generally speaking, books, presentations, conferences, and so on that explain abstract concepts praising their advantages without explaining how to apply them in everyday development disturb me. I thought this book would be one of them. I was wrong, and, just this time, I was glad I was.

While the book introduces component based development (CBD) from an abstract viewpoint, it goes farther and explains how to apply it in practice. Often, the book presents an ideal theoretical view of how things should be. Then, this view is completed with what is possible in practice and with advice, I believe, from experience about what to do in specific situations.

To complete this practical point of view, the author advises applying common sense in all situations; for example, not to apply CBD to every system development. She recommends instead being realistic and looking for the business opportunity to apply CBD. “Is CBD going to bring some business advantage?” is the question to ask yourself before trying to apply CBD blindly as the last silver bullet.

The book develops like a spiral. The core phases and concepts of using CBD are presented at the beginning. Specific sections and chapters are devoted to each phase and to the most important concepts. Following sections and chapters may review the concepts adding new details, resulting in a very instructive volume.

The analysis remains independent from any technical implementation, being applicable to .NET, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), or common object request broker architecture (CORBA) environments. Despite that, the references to existing technology and emerging standards are abundant, even if sometimes, some issues are discussed without providing an explicit reference to existing developments. For example, no mention is made in the discussion on configuration of components in chapter 2 of the capabilities of certain component execution environments based on J2EE or runtime configuration via Java management extension (JMX).

The weakest point of the book is the shortage of examples. Sometimes additional examples would have helped the reader to grasp the concepts being discussed faster. The last chapter is devoted to explaining how an organization embraced CBD and the results that were reached. However, the presentation is too vague and general to describe this.

In the preface, it is stated that “this book aims to meet the needs of practitioners, and in particular the need of program planners and architects, who are likely to be responsible for achieving the introduction of CBD into the organisation.” I think that the book will be really helpful for that audience since it covers all related aspects to CBD, including planning, giving advice on the elaboration of a blueprint at company level, designing, acquiring, and assembling components.