# Welcome to BON

(the Business Object Notation)

## Background

The BON method for analysis and design of object-oriented software was developed 1989-93 by Jean-Marc Nerson and Kim Waldén as a means of extending the higher-level concepts of the Eiffel programming language into the realm of analysis and design aided by a graphical notation.

The core idea is simplicity and well-defined semantics, since from our industrial experience we know that anything complex and/or ambiguous becomes useless in practice, and tends to be a hindrance rather than an aid to successful completion of software projects. In this respect, BON could be viewed as the direct opposite of the widely publicized UML/RUP approach.

The method builds on three principles, fundamental to the construction of industrial strength quality software: seamlessness, reversibility and software contracts. A ten-page overview can be found in "Handbook of Object Technology", CRC Press 1998.

BON is described in depth in the book "Seamless Object-Oriented Software Architecture", Prentice Hall 1994, by Kim Waldén and Jean-Marc Nerson. Unfortunately, the book has been out of print for three years and is only obtainable from second-hand book stores. But the good news is that it is now available in pdf-format.

## The BON site

This web site is maintained by one of the authors, Kim Waldén. Over the years, I have had many requests both for the book and for a BON drawing tool. However, since the bound book is hard to come by, and because until recently there has not been any widely available drawing support by which to produce BON diagrams, setting up a web site for BON has seemed rather pointless.

Fortunately, this has now changed. We have had the copyright to the book reversed back from Prentice Hall to the authors and I have managed to create BONsai, a Visio Solution for BON, which makes it possible to draw even fairly complex diagrams quickly and easily using the well-known general Visio tool as drawing engine.

My primary intent is to make the book text as well as the Visio Solution for drawing BON diagrams freely available to anyone interested in learning more about BON, and to use it as aid in their software projects. Questions and general comments can be directed to kim@bon-method.com.

If you are experiencing trouble with these pages, please let me know, preferably with an attached screendump if the layout is scrambled.

Seems to work ok with the following browsers:

| Internet Explorer | 4.72, 5.0, 5.50, 6.0
| Netscape Navigator | 4.76, 4.77, 4.79, 4.8, 7.0, 7.01, 7.02, 7.1
| Opera | 7 (frame cursor displaced and barely legible)
| Mozilla | 1.2.1, 1.3, 1.4, 1.6
| Mozilla Firefox | 1.4, 1.5