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OOPSLA'96 Workshop

Business Object Design and Implementation II: Business Objects as Distributed Application Components - the enterprise solution?

1996 Final Report:

OOPSLA'96 Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation II. 11th Annual Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications Addendum to the Proceedings. OOPS Messenger, ACM/SIGPLAN, 1997 (in press).

Participants

Position Papers Presented (most hits first)

Martin Fowler. Analysis Patterns and Business Objects. 13 August 1996.

Paul Evitts. Business Objects, Business Patterns. Updated 4 Sep 1996.

Ralph E. Johnson and Kazuki Yoshida. Models of Business Objects: Accounts. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 25 Aug 1996.

Fred A. Cummins. An Object Model for Business Applications. Electronic Data Systems. 4 Sep 1996.

Wolfgang Schulze, Markus Böhm, Klaus Meyer-Wegener. Services of Workflow Objects and Workflow Meta-Objects in OMG-compliant Environments. Dresden University of Technology, Database Group, 19 August 1996

William McCarthy, Julia Smith David, and Brian S.Sommer. The Evolution of Enterprise Information Systems -- From Sticks and Jars Past Journals and Ledgers Toward Interorganizational Webs of Business Objects and Beyond, Michigan State University, 27 Sep 1996.

Mark Baker. Workflow Meets Business Objects. Northern Telecom Network Services Management, 8 Sep 1996.

Texas Instruments Business Object Architecture Team (Ed. Tom Digre). Business Object Facility. Texas Intruments, Inc. 28 March 1996 (presented by Glenn Hollowell).

Presenters unable to attend:

Christopher Spottiswoode. The emperor's new clothes -- an outsider's perspective. Updated 29 Sep 1996.

• Spottiswoode's FAQ: Christopher Spottiswood answers his critics ...

Stephan Schreyjak. Aspects of the integration of a componentware system with a workflow system. University of Stuttgart, 20 August 1996

Ken Schwaber. Controlled Chaos : Living on the Edge. Advanced Development Methods, 4 Sep 1996.

Haim Kilov, I.D. Simmonds. Business patterns: reusable abstract constructs for business specification. IBM T J Watson Resarch Center, 28 Sep 1996.

Additional papers to be published in proceedings:

Andrew Watson. Coda: OMG Rationale for Choosing the Classical Object Model (Or why there has not been an "insidious shift in OMG aims.") Object Management Group, 13 Sep 96

Jeff Sutherland. Integrating Java, Objects, Databases, and the Web. IDX Systems Corporation, Revised 15 Nov 1996

E-Mail

• jeff.sutherland@computer.org

Call for Participation

The ASC X3H7 Object Information Management Committee and the Object Management Group Business Object Domain Task Force will jointly sponsor the Second Annual Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation. This year's workshop will focus on distributed component design and implementation of component-based frameworks as enterprise application solutions. Last year's organizing committee has been joined by the Chairs of two other OOPSLA'95 Workshops to build on the success of last year's workshop and strengthen the anticipated results of this workshop.

Goals of Business Object Workshop II

• Clarify the specification, design, and implementation of interoperable, plug and play, distributed Business Object components and their suitability for delivery of enterprise applications.
• Assess the impact of the WWW and, more specifically, the Intranet on the design and implementation of Business Object components.

Results from Business Object Workshop I

The wide variety of papers presented and the high level of expertise last year's workshop led to a consensus on several important issues:

• In the future, cycle time will be the most critical issue for business operations. The speed with which new or enhanced products and services can be developed and delivered to the marketplace will determine market share and profitability.
• Products and services will be increasingly supported by software components. Most of these components must be reused from previous development efforts in order to meet required cycle times. This requires major advances in component interoperability and availability. A model for this activity exists in the custom chip industry which is already selling software components packaged as hardware [Digre95].
• A radical reversal in the current approach to software engineering is required to meet market demands. Currently, systems have tight coupling between software components (inflexible systems), and loose coupling between analysis, design, and implementation (leading to excessive cost and delivery times, as well as poor fit of software to user requirements). In the future, Business Process Reengineering methods will be tightly coupled with object-oriented analysis and design. Most of the code which is currently written by hand will be generated from design, or reusable components will eliminate the need to write it.
• Advances in the software development process are required to dramatically improve productivity in a component based development environment. In particularly, previous methods have assumed software development is a controlled process rather than an empirical process. Component based object systems are not Turing machines because of their event driven nature [Wegner95], and as a result are not fully specifiable. The process control industry has developed methods to deal with these types of empirical processes and these methods must be applied to software development using a SCRUM approach [Schwaber95].
• Component based architectures will be built from replaceable units of functionality that reduce the surface area of systems that are doubling in complexity each year. Large grain components will have clear sets of responsibilities or roles, and expose semantics of the business as well as syntax of interfaces [Digre95].
• There are specific design patterns that should be implemented throughout business systems that will substantially improve reusability and rigor in business systems logic. The "Give/Take" pattern that has been standardized by accounting research should be rigorously implemented in all business systems and mandated in all accounting systems [McCarthy95]. As much as 50% of the typical business application could be built from recursively implementing this pattern. Many companies (even banks) have trouble balancing their books or accurately determining the current status of business operations because of failure to implement this pattern properly in their business software systems.

Focus of This Year's Workshop

The OMG Business Object Domain Task Force has issued an RFP on Common Business Objects and Business Object Facility. The Business Object Facility is to provide a component based substructure that allows Business Objects to be implemented as interoperable plug and play components. Common Business Objects are plug and play components that are used to support domain specific application frameworks. Responses to the RFP can be more effectively evaluated if technical papers are available that provide in-depth analysis of the following issues.

• What design patterns will allow implementation of Business Objects as plug and play components? Are they an example of the composite object design pattern in Gamma et al., Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software?
• What are components? How should they be specified? Visualized?
• What common components should be implemented to support multiple application domains? Are there common design patterns that cross domains?
• How can these components be assembled into domain specific frameworks?
• What are appropriate architectures/mechanisms for implementing these frameworks as distributed object systems?
• What organizational and development process issues need to be addressed to successfully deliver these systems?
• Is this approach an effective means for deploying enterprise application solutions? What actual distributed object systems of this nature exist today in production?

Impact of the Intranet

To say that there has been an explosive uptake of the Internet or the WWW would be an understatement. However, simultaneously, there has been a parallel interest in the Intranet, or the EWW (Enterprise Wide Web). Most corporations make extensive use of this facility for a number of reasons. This culture provides an ideal environment conducive to business object design and implementation. The Intranet can be used to deliver software and up-dates immediately to users across the corporate network. This will gain momentum as new technologies such as Java become more widely available, and allows the creation and distribution of objects.

• What issues are raised by the Intranet (or Internet) for design, implementation, and distribution of Business Object Components?

Publication of Workshop Proceedings

It is anticipated, as in the 1995 Business Object Workshop, that papers will be published as a book by Springer Verlag through a review and revision process during and after the Workshop. 

Submission

• Prospective participants are solicited to submit a 2-3 page position paper or experience report, preferably in Word or RTF format, by e-mail to jeff.sutherland@idx.com, no later than August 15, 1996. All submissions must include the full contact information of at least one author.
• Position papers will be converted to HTML and placed on the World Wide Web for review (see Business Object Workshop I).

Attendance

• Attendance to the workshop is limited to facilitate lively discussions and the exchange of ideas. Participation will be by invitation only, based on the organizing committee's evaluation of the submissions. Accepted participants will be notified in September 1996.

Agenda

• The successful and intensive process used for Business Object Workshop I will be used in Workshop II. Papers will be presented in 15 minute segments followed by a 10 minute question and answer period throughout the day.
• Approximately 12 papers will be presented. Order of presentation will be in reverse order of interest level generated by World Wide Web hits on the position paper.
• There will be a summary and conclusions session at the end of the day. Instruction for submission and review of papers for publication by Springer Verlag will be presented. Position papers submitted but not presented may still be published via the review process after the Workshop.

Background

The Second Annual OOPSLA Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation is jointly sponsored by the Accredited Standards Committee X3H7 Object Information Management Technical Committee and the Object Management Group (OMG) Business Object Management Special Interest Group (BOMSIG) for the purpose of soliciting technical position papers relevant to the design and implementation of Business Object systems.

X3H7 Object Information Management

In 1994, the X3H7 Object Information Management Technical Committee projected that over the next decade, more than 80% of new object-oriented software systems would be built in three object-oriented languages (Smalltalk, C++, and OO COBOL) and communicate through a Object Request Broker to four primary external environments (SQL databases, Object Databases, Microsoft OLE/COM, and CORBA objects).

Interoperability of large grained objects existing in these environments was identified as a core activity in the standards process.

In addition, X3H7 projected that implementation of systems will move up to a higher level of abstraction. A business model will be built for enterprise applications using standard object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) techniques, legacy CASE models will be incorporated, and major amounts of code will be autogenerated, rather than hand coded. OOAD models, documentation, and code will be stored and versioned in an object repository and injected into the run time environment. Furthermore, the business object model will be a component-based model that supports component distribution over arbitrary processors on a network.

Provision for interoperability between standard business components was identified as a major priority. One can conclude, based on the experience at SEMATECH and NIST, building large software frameworks for chip fabrication plants requires a Business Object Component Architecture to enable interoperability. This insight is generalizable across a wide variety of application domains.

The need for a component-based enterprise architecture led X3H7 to propose development of an ISO RM-ODP Enterprise Viewpoint Companion Standard. This resulted in the initiation of three activities:

• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 21 WG7 initiation of a New Work Item proposal for an Enterprise Viewpoint Component Standard to be reviewed at the May 1996 meeting of S21 in Kansas City.
• X3H7 initiation of a close liaison with the OMG BOMSIG work on a Business Application Architecture.
• X3H7 and OMG BOMSIG sponsorship of an OOPSLA'95 Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation to facilitate technical input from industry, government, and academic communities.

OMG Business Object Domain Task Force (formerly BOMSIG)

The Object Management Group's central mission is to establish an architecture and set of specifications, based on commercially available object technology, to enable distributed integrated applications. Primary goals are the reusability, portability and interoperability of object-based software components in distributed heterogeneous environments. To this end, the OMG adopts interface and protocol specifications that define an Object Management Architecture (OMA) that supports applications based on distributed interoperating objects.

The current focus of OMG BODTF is a Request For Proposal (RFP) to address the OMA component called Common Facilities. The RFP solicits proposals for the following:

• Common Business Objects
• Business Object Facility

The objectives of the RFP are:

• To address the need for significantly enhanced levels of simplicity, over and above that which exists today, to the task of defining, designing, building and deploying integrated yet flexible business solutions. Reduction of complexity is to be achieved through a higher level of abstraction and greater reuse than exists today for business applications.
• To provide a common starting point for the work of domain standards groups.

Providing the required higher level of abstraction has two separate, but closely related, aspects:

• Business objects as design-time (modeling-time/analysis-time etc.) constructs or models, some of which are domain-specific, others having cross-domain applicability (Common Business Objects)
• A set of facilities that brings significantly greater levels of simplicity in developing the run-time deployable software that implements those constructs or models (Business Object Facility). This set of facilities would include both behaviors shared by all business objects and through business object linkages to underlying computational mechanisms.

The Business Object Facility should provide the abstraction which hides computational complexities, and enables business objects to interoperate efficiently and reliably in multi-user, concurrent, distributed, heterogeneous environments.

The Common Business Objects component of this RFP should provide a common starting point for enterprise application developers and domain industry standards groups by providing a set of business concept abstractions from which more specific business objects can be specialized. In some cases these abstract objects may be quite generic since the concept varies considerably from one industry to the next. In other cases, the abstractions may be quite specific because the concept occurs much the same in all industries. The objective is to promote consistency across industries and enterprises and minimize the duplication of effort to define and eventually implement (using the Business Object Facility) enterprise and industry frameworks.

The people who will benefit from the greater levels of simplicity include:

• those tasked with business object modeling, analysis and design, and
• those whose job it is to implement those designs in code such that their end products will interoperate with those of other implementers, and
• the business that use the resultant business object based applications, through a flexible information system designed to serve business needs.

The work of OMG BODTF is directly related to the current work of the X3H7 Object Information Management Committee. Industry consortia standards developed by OMG can be formalized through the accredited standards process through the current ISO work item that is the designated task of X3H7. 

Organizers:

Jeff Sutherland, Chair - jeff.sutherland@idx.com

Cory Casanave - cory_casanave@omg.org

Richard Due' - rtdue@ccinet.ab.ca

Glenn Hollowell - glenn@hollowell.org

Haim Kilov - kilov@watson.ibm.com

Joaquin Miller - miller@shl.com

Dilip Patel - dilip@vax.sbu.ac.uk

Pointers of Interest

• OOPSLA'95 Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation
• OOPSLA'95 Workshop Report on Business Object Design and Implemention
• OMG Commmon Facilities RFP4: Common Business Objects and Business Object Facility
• The Object Technology Architecture: Business Objects for Corporate Information Systems
• Design Patterns
• X3H7 Object Model Features Matrix
• White Paper on OMG Business Application Architecture - Draft/Overview
• BOMSIG Glossary of Terms