Customer Reviews

Architecting Enterprise Solutions: Patterns for High-Capability Internet-based Systems (Wiley Software Patterns Series)

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Non-functional requirements, i.e. the many software -ilities, are often neglected in the development of software systems. Even though they are a key factor in final user satisfaction and everybody acknowledges their importance, their prominence is usually downplayed. This book tries to fill this gap and it focuses on balancing the non-functional features of Internet-based software systems.

"Architecting Enterprise Solutions", following the so-called patterns movement, is organized around a set of patterns, which are classified into four groups:

1. Fundamental patterns describe the basic shape for Internet-based systems, why they tend to use application servers and why they recur to "specialist peripherals."

2. Performance, availability, and scalability involve some kind of redundancy (e.g. the performance-related patterns involve tiers with redundant elements, load balancing, data replication, and effective resource management, such as pooling and caching).

3. Control patterns deal with system manageability and security. Status reporting, monitoring, alerting, logging and dynamic configuration are key for manageability, while the proper use of demilitarized zones, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, encryption, and public key infrastructure are fundamental for security.

4. Finally, evolution patterns address maintainability, flexibility, portability, and migration. Among other things, here you will find information on virtual platforms and staging environments.

A final section describes how the patterns can be applied in practice, illustrating how the patterns trade-offs can lead to different system configurations.

In summary, "Architecting Enterprise Solutions" collects the know-how of experienced system architects. It clearly shows how design decisions affect the non-functional characteristics of Internet-based systems and it does so without forgetting the cost implications of such decisions (something every architect on a tight budget will surely thank).

Disclaimer: If you are just looking for solutions to the problems you face using a particular programming language, framework or platform, you should look elsewhere. If you would like to delve into the rationale behind key design decisions in Internet-based systems (beyond the use of particular technologies), this might be a good place to start.

That author focuses on that the fact that system architecture is driven by non-functional requirements. This is a critical fact that is missed by many other books on architecture.

C. Arnold made a very realistic review about this book. In past years I've been working a lot at on architecture subjects and read this book was like having a nice chat with someone on a high level than me where I careful pay attention on every single word said to me, doesn't matter if already have some knowledge about, it is nice to conciliate the knowledge.

Could take decades to someone get the experience of the authors of this book. As I said to pinguinu:

"Even if they talk something about JAVA, I could identify all the things to work with .net. In the end it is a platform independent subject and such things stays forever on the shelf.
This book is for the Titans, not to everyone! It was a wonderful 3 weeks times until the end of the book."

Thanks to C. Arnold, I bought this book because of his review.

My background is in enterprise application development/architecture, and I found this book to be a great introduction to the larger scope of system architecture. The patterns presented paint an easy to understand picture of what a highly capable Inter/intra- net system should look like.

I found the level of detail to be great, as I was interested in an overview. If you're looking for implementation specifics, this would be a good starting point, but many of the platform-specific details would probably be found in other books.

I regret having spent at least two weeks (on and off) trying to read this book.
It has some good points, yet its drawbacks make it almost useless:
- it is not very practical, it is quite abstract actually
- it is dry, confusing and filled with repetitions
- the contents of this book could fit in 30-40 pages and this would save a lot of reading time
- it is specific to J2EE and its associated architecture (web server -> application server -> database server, etc). The book's title should reflect this and yet it doesn't.
- most of the so called patterns (local cache, logging, etc) have been around for some time and are much better described in other books

I could go on and on.
It just suffices to say that I finished the book in the end and, since I do not wish to inflict the pain of reading this book on others, I just threw it away.

In conclusion, do not waste your time reading this book.

I have been an Quickbooks user since 1993. Once you build a datafile, it's very difficult to switch to another software. So you're basically stuck. I have moved up to the Enterprise Soltuions software - as a result of bad, erroneous advice from support at Intuit. In any event, I spend the 1st hour of each morning trying to open my data file. So, if that's what you want to do, by all means by this software. As I write this review I am on hold - once again - for at least 45 minutes. Oh, I take that back, after holding for 45 minutes, the call was dropped so now I have to start all over again. Almost everyday I go through this. Frustrating beyond words.