Customer Reviews

CORBA Design Patterns

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Everyone else on this page has done a great job of pointing out the shortcomings of this tome. But another thing that ought to be mentioned is the astonishingly self-aggrandizing writing style. Mowbray seems to denigrate the Gang of Four (whose shoes he is not fit to shine) by saying that their book addresses only a micro-architectural level, while his is the "first" to deal with higher levels. He says this over and over, in a not-so-subtle way of favorably comparing himself to them. Well, big whoop! His "higher level" patterns are obscure and not particularly useful. They are based more on the technical specificities of CORBA itself - which change every time the CORBA standard does. And then he even applies patterns to how organizations should be run!? This is just a bit much. Design patterns are no substitute for management theory. Anyway, my favorite part is the bibliography, in which every single book is described as "essential" or "unmissable" or something like that - especially the other books by Mowbray. I forget the exact word he used, as I threw out this piece of trash months ago.

This book contains titles and summaries for several useful CORBA design patterns. However, on a closer read you will find that it does not contain nearly the depth and breadth of the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. I would love to see someone actually provide detail for the Participants, Consequences, and Implementation sections that were so well documented in the GOF book, but conspicuously absent in this one. What an obvious rush-to-market to jump on the Design Pattern frenzy.

Yes, having read the GOF book, this one does not stand up to it's level of detail and many of the patterns are not that great. However, I am surprised by how harsh some of the reviews are. The review of system scale and the relation to level of pattern usage was worthwhile and some patterns, while people will say "duh, how obvious", are decent intros for those who do not have in depth knowledge. I would recommend this book to newbies in OO and CORBA and not to a seasoned OO developer. That's the differentiation that needs to be made. Read Enterprise CORBA by Slama et al if you're looking for more detail on CORBA in general. If you want a high level review of patterns and how they apply to CORBA level OO, this book is fine.

I was hoping to find a good book with some solid CORBA design patterns. Instead I found a book with no real world applicability which is painfully dry. Examples in C, come on. Save your money this ones a major bust.

Avoid this book at all costs. It is very basic, and you will be dissapointed. It does not cover anything worth reading.

The "patterns" covered are quick make ups to fill the pages

After buying the book and reading it's excellent title you'll be sadly dissapointed to find the the "design patterns" contained are actually fluff for well known simple concepts. A classic example is "Distrbuted Callback". This describes in 6 pages what can be said in 2 words.... oneway void. The rest is sadly derivative.

The design patterns when presented are useful and informative. However, the attempt to provide a theoretical justification for the approach is turgid in the extreme. Jump straight in to the second half of the book and completely ignore the introductory chapters

The thing I liked best about this book: The diagram at the beginning of each pattern summarizing it. The diagrams are succinct and worth a thousand words. The things I liked least about this book: 1. Fluff in the first 78 pages. The discussions about scale and primal forces were useful but could have been more brief. Things I wish this book had: 1. A short chapter on CORBA basics. 2. Notes on how much work is involved in implementing a pattern in a CORBA implementation (Orbix, Visigenics etc.) 3. A Rating of by how much does incorporating a particular pattern improve things - a lot, or a little? eg. improve performance, reduce complexity...

I found this book to be worthless. I would almost never use any of the patterns he describes in a real world CORBA implementation. The only exception to this would be the dynamic attribute pattern, but I would only use that now that Objects-by-Value are available.

In contrast to the other reviewers, I found the first 78+ pages -extremely- helpful. There are some essential items which really put the material into context. And, you won't get this full view of things from GoF: A taxonomy of design patterns, an explanation of horizontal versus vertical design, an explanation of where this kind of design fits into the whole organization, etc.