CBD Forum aids information swap

The Butler Group consultancy has set up the Component Based Development (CBD) Forum to provide members with a means of swapping information and to develop a reference model for building component-based applications.

The founder members of the CBD Forum are IBM, Sterling Software, Seer, Select Software and Supernova, each of which paid a #950 subscription to join. User members such as Alliance & Leicester, British Airways and the Bank of Scotland are entitled to free membership for six months to evaluate whether the Forum is useful to them or not.

"There's a huge amount of interest in what component-based development is and how you do it, but a lot of people are worried because they don't know how to move forward," commented Peter Sprott, the CBD Forum's manager.

"There's a lot of confusion, so people are interested in talking to others involved in projects to share experiences and document best practice, and to ensure they don't make too many mistakes because it involves a big change in the way you do things. Most see CBD as a technical issue, but as they start, they realise it is a business issue too," said Sprott.

He added that the Forum would provide a news service, bulletin boards, special interest groups, a monthly journal and a quarterly market trends report on its web site at www.butlerforums.com.

The organisation has also just put the CBD Reference Model out to review by its members. It expects to publish the completed document by the end of the year.

The Model provides users with guidelines on how to undertake CBD and is divided into three main sections.

The first part defines what a component is and what types of components there are, the second outlines the different ways programmers can build and assemble components, while the third provides a generic execution model or framework to implement the components.

The Forum will hold its first founders' meeting in early December, but a general meeting of all members will follow in February.