A component model. Specifically, a subset of Microsoft's COM model that was especially designed for the Internet.

A subset or viewpoint that describes one aspect of a component architecture. Specifically, an applications architecture describes the set of applications that a company supports or is developing at one point in time and defines the basic relationships between the different applications.

The basic elements and relationships that will be required or used to solve a problem. There are many different types of architectures. There are hardware as well as software architectures, although in this book we only focus on the latter. Among the high-level or corporate software architectures, the distributed or enterprise component architecture is widely considered the best approach for the development of e-business systems. The enterprise component architecture can be broken down into subarchitectures that specify particular aspects or viewpoints involved in the development of an application. In this book, we break a component architecture down into five subarchitectures or viewpoints: an applications architecture, a technical architecture, a business model, an implementation architecture, and an operations architecture.

A large-scale component designed to function as a module that can be used in the assembly of an enterprise application. Business components usually contain other smaller components, are often distributed across multiple platforms, and form the basis of serious software reuse.

A business concept that represents a "thing" (as opposed to a process) in the business. For example, a...