This paper describes a component based design for building OPC applications rapidly in a standard object oriented application development environment. The described design makes up a component based platform that enables rapid development of industrial applications. In addition to OPC, the platform helps to deliver device and production data through other standard communication channels, such as ODBC, HTTP, SOAP, etc. It enables development of flexible, efficient and reliable applications that take full advantages of the OPC communication level, without the need to learn the communication standard or the common pitfalls in OPC communications. It enables the developer to concentrate on the application level, such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), production management systems (PMS), manufacturing execution systems (MES), asset management, product life cycle management, eService, etc. The platform integrates into the industry leading rapid application development (RAD) tools, Borland Delphi and C++ Builder, which are used to build efficient and feature rich applications to Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, including Microsoft .NET. The platform connects and uses the best practices and components available for those environments, supporting rapid development of data acquisition, data analysis, full featured user interfaces, database access and web services, in addition to the OPC communications. It can be enhanced to enable OPC Server functionality, which will enable leveraging application data to upper level industrial systems, for example enterprise resource planning (ERP) and plant resource management (PRM) systems.