The emerging trends for e-business engineering revolve
around specialisation and cooperation. Successful
companies focus on their core competences, and rely on a
network of business partners for the support services
required to compose a comprehensive offer for their
customers. Modulariy is crucial for a flexible e-business
infrastructure, but related requirements seldom reflect on
the design and operational models of business
information systems.
Software components are widely used for the
implementation of e-business applications, with proved
benefits in terms of system development and maintenance.
We propose a service-oriented componentisation of ebusiness
systems as a way to close the gap with the
business models they support. Blurring the distinction
between external services and internal capabilities, we
propose a homogeneous model for the definition of ebusiness
applications components. After a brief
discussion on the foundational aspects of the approach,
we present the process-based technique we adopted for
component modelling. We then present an infrastructure
compliant with the model proposed that we built on top of
an EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) platform
