15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Frameworks are really important!!!, July 28, 2005
This review is from: Developing Application Frameworks in .NET (Paperback)
This book is great for architects, though some of his designs i wasn't, personally, comfortable with!
Anyway, the author sets the groundwork in `how to' on building frameworks. First few chapters are excellent insight on why we need frameworks and talks about different useful strategies.
But i did find couple of places where i had to refactor it for better usability...
- Class Factories: i was really uncomfortable the way Class factories were implemented in this book by the author. For e.g. he expects the developer to provide string based value...which i personally feel is error prone...
Instead of calling
pf = (ProductFactory)SAF.ClassFactory.GetFactory("ProductFactory-A ");
i feel you should rather pass
pf = (ProductFactory)SAF.ClassFactory.GetFactory(typeof (ProductFactory));
now on the server side, whatever is the current implementation of the abstract class ProductFactory is available, it would be passed back to the client...so the configuration file would change from
<Class name="ProductFactory-A"
type="TestConcreteFactory.ConcreteProductFactory,TestConcreteFactory"/>
to
<Class name="<
>.ProductFactory"
type="TestConcreteFactory.ConcreteProductFactory,TestConcreteFactory"/>
all the server has to do is use FullName property on the type just passed to it and look into the configuration file for it.
this way, developers don't have to look around for what concrete implementation is available..
[Only drawback is that we would only have one concrete implementation available, but u r not restricted to extend it by passing additional parameters]
- Caching: Caching design in this book is one of the best designs I have ever seen. The author uses XML to store the cached objects in hierarchical structure. It solved almost all of my caching problems, like breadcrumbs on web-pages, which became part of our web framework now, user preferences, organization preferences [user can belong to multiple orgs] was also solved by this design.
But there was one very important thing that the author didn't mention was expiring stale objects in cache collection.
The easiest way to expire data is to calculate its ideal time. We could create another thread, which would interrogate each object in the cache collection for its ideal time and it would expire the least used object from the cache immediately.
Furthermore, every time an object is retrieved from the cache, we timestamp it with the latest time.
This would keep the cache from consuming insane amount of memory on the server.
I really liked other chapters too,
- Windows Service - though I rather deploy my objects in Component Services
- MSMQ - MSMQ is very useful but highly under-credited. This chapter definitely gives us more insight on how to leverage MSMQ in enterprise systems.
- Authorization/Authentication - I would say pretty good content
- Transaction - depends upon architecture of a project. If all the data intensive tasks are done in one stored procedures, then we really don't need to use Transaction services & simply rely on DB transactions, but if you have individual objects do individual data related tasks then Transactions offered by Enterprise Services are really helpful.
Nevertheless, I strongly recommend this book for all software guys.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow!, November 16, 2004
This review is from: Developing Application Frameworks in .NET (Paperback)
This book really sheds light on many of the Classic Gang of Four Design Patterns and provides real world, meaningful examples to demonstrate them.
If you have ever wanted to know how to use proper object oriented techniques in .NET, this book is for you.
The book provides some very interesting approaches on extensible, practicle, and reusable code, and the samples are right on par with the typical functionality that an application framework should provide.
It is also a very clean and easy to read book, and is organized very well.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overall Good Reading, July 17, 2006
This review is from: Developing Application Frameworks in .NET (Paperback)
As one would say that mere coders think in terms of ad-hoc one time solutions while developers and software engineers think how to incorporate these best practices in the form of an application framework. Xin Chen has done a good job explaining big picture thinking i.e. how a set of libraries or classes that are used to implement the standard structure of an application are made to collaborate in the form of a reusable framework.
I'm personally a big fan of application frameworks which provide extensibility along with good foundation support for example Rocky Lhotka's CSLA (Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture). Xin Chen does the similar job building one chapter at a time. He is walking the reader through step by step building of the framework and keeping the big picture in sight. The book is divided into 15 chapters in which Xin elaborates on application frameworks, dissect them, discusses class factories, caching, configuration, windows services, message queuing, authorization, authentication, cryptography, transaction, document layer and work flow services. The author has high degree of familiarity with GOF design patterns so reader will see the degree of reusability and patterns & practices in action. Application event logging and exception handling is an inherent part of any application framework however I was disappointed to see not much discussion about it in the book. Also, during the discussion of real world business problems, author did not discuss rules engines or provide guidance about integrating dynamic logic into your framework which I strongly feel should be an integral part of an enterprise level architecture. The current business models as we know them thrive on change and we cannot isolate development designs from user's needs.
Having said that, if you are looking to build a large amount of reusable code into a framework to save development time for yourself and fellow colleagues / developers, this book will provide you enough good pointers for this purpose. Author recognizes that the frameworks cannot be built in the air and hence provided us with concrete examples. I'll also recommend reading "GOF Design Patterns", Rocky Lhotka's "CSLA.NET 2.0 (Expert C# Business Objects)" and "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries" along with this if you are serious about developing application frameworks for your enterprise.
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