While the software industry is looking forward to benefits from reusability, there is a great need to fully develop component technology. This in turn requires material for reference and for the training of software developers, managers, and professionals responsible for technology evaluation and software architecture. This book is definitely a step toward that goal. It also makes an important point about the need for component standards. While chapter 3 is devoted to standards issues, the entire book would be good reading for standards committee members.

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1, “Motivation: Components and Markets,” consists of three chapters that introduce components and related issues, including markets versus technology. Chapter 2 examines market forecasts from the mid-1990s and earlier. This part also discusses the importance of standards, examines the present state of component technology, and looks to the future.

Part 2, “Foundation,” lays the foundation for the main topic of the book with eight chapters that begin by examining important issues--what a component is, component interfaces and re-entrance, and the substitutability of one component for another. In chapter 7, the author discusses object versus class composition, various aspects of inheritance in different object models, and the problems introduced by some of these. Factors that determine the size of a component are discussed in chapter 8. Chapter 9 reviews established approaches to reuse design, then examines interoperability and system reengineering. Chapter 10 considers programming issues that affect component technology. This part concludes with chapter 11, an interesting look at definitions of software components given by other authors.

Part 3, “State of the Art,” is an eight-chapter survey and analysis of selected practices of component technology. The author looks at three main approaches in some detail--CORBA, COM, and Java.

Part 4 discusses “The Next Generation.” After laying the foundations in Part 2 and discussing the current approaches in Part 3, the author provides perspectives on future technical developments in component technology. Chapter 20 discusses the concept of component architectures, which leads to the coverage of component frameworks in chapter 21 and three case studies in chapter 22. Chapter 23 looks at component acquisition and distribution, followed by component assembly in chapter 24. Some open problems are discussed in chapter 25.

Part 5, “Markets and Components,” examines the issues of markets and jobs created by component technology.

Though it was not written as a textbook for computer science students, the book could be used as a supplementary reference in courses such as software engineering and object-oriented programming. It could lead to discussion of issues related to component technology that can contribute to software reuse. As the author points out in chapter 11, there has been limited discussion of component technology in print, and there are no standards on the subject. The author makes a case for more discussion and creative work to fully develop component technology.