This tutorial reviews the basic concepts behind enterprise component technologies. We will motivate the progression from CORBA and DCOM middleware to the today's competing enterprise component technologies: Microsoft's COM+ and Sun's Enterprise JavaBeans. We will explore the motivation and rise of 3-tier architectures, explain the need for migrating database transaction processing, authorization, and resource management into middleware, and review future technical problems that will need to be addressed. The tutorial assumes rudimentary knowledge of Java, CORBA/DCOM, and relational databases, but no experience with the tutorial's subject.

Don Batory holds the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professorship Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is an industry consultant on product-line architectures and extensible, component-based software designs. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He was a member of the ACM Software Systems Award Committee, where in 1993 he was the Committee Chairman, and was an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems from 1986 to 1992, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Database Engineering from 1981 to 1984. Dr. Batory was the Program Committee Chairman for the 3rd International Conference on Software Reuse (1994) and the 1999 International Workshop on Software Reuse (WISR).  He has received numerous best paper awards at software reuse, software engineering, and database conferences.