Customer Reviews

Enterprise Corba

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is relatively advanced book on CORBA, that covers issues of design of distributed systems using CORBA. If it wasn't for the CORBA focus (and, obviously, consideration of some CORBA specifics) this would be a good book for the designer of any distributed system.

This is not a book for the person who wishes to learn how to program using CORBA. Rather, it is aimed squarely at the system architect. The concerns it raises are real, and design trade-offs are carefully considered.

On CORBA specifics, the main weakness is that the book refers to superseded parts of the CORBA standard.

The book is well laid out, and information relatively easy to find.

With this book the authors have filled a gaping void in the CORBA literature: to describe in usable, practical terms the design of high-end, production CORBA systems.

I have years of experience in CORBA, and I learned a lot from this book. The sections on database integration, persistence, and transactions are invaluable, and you just can't get it anywhere else.

The book is quite well-written, notable for its clarity of exposition and organized presentation.

I found the most salient feature of this book was that it made CORBA seem exciting! It described how to design and architect really interesting CORBA systems, with patterns that show how to do replication, fault-tolerance, distributed transactionality. The book also does a good job of distinguishing between parts of CORBA that exist only on paper and the parts that are really implemented. Some authors are unrealistic in their assessment of the state of the CORBA.

I had two complaints. First, I would have liked to have seen much more detailed examples and code samples. Second, the authors seem to suggest that GUI tools are akin to ease-of-use - they mention several times how GUI-based tools will make CORBA easier to use. I have never felt that GUI tools are necessarily related to ease-of-use, and indeed their use I think can lead to maintenance problems. (For instance, the authors say they look forward to GUI tools coming out of Borland/Inprise). I think a clean, well-documented API; a robust ORB; and a good set of examples; and emacs; is much more useful than some fancy tool. But I'm maybe out of step with fashion here.

In summary, this is absolutely a must-have book for anyone involved in CORBA! For beginners, it opens vistas; for experts, it has something to teach; for developers, it is a reference, chock full of ideas.

Very high level discussion of the topics of CORBA, probably good for Coffee table discussions.

Need a powerful CORBA Book? There's none out there! The closest one to teach you good concepts is the one by Mitchi Henning and Steve Vinoski.

I don't want to say that this is a bad book, but it's not for anyone who'd like to see examples implementing some of the concepts they write about. There are only snippets of CORBA IDL. If you're one of those people, save your money for Advanced Corba Programming with C++. I should have.

First off - let me come clean : I'm biased!!!

The authors are all Senior Consultants in our Professional Services Group at IONA Technologies.

I'll limit my review to saying this: if you are seeking real, practical advice on how to actually build a CORBA system - then I believe this book is a must-have.

To my mind, the authors have zoned in on the key topics we see again and again when building systems - object location and naming, scaling, performance, database integration, etc. You get the necessary fragments of code, IDL, design and architecture to ensure you can really understand the issues and apply it to your own situation.

Because it's based on experience on the field, the book has a "been there, done that" feel to it - but it manages to avoid being overly didactic or preachy. The authors are very clear to identify open issues where they exist, and manage to group their topics to that beginners and experts alike will gain from their experience.

All in all, the CORBA development community sorely needed a book like this, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone building or thinking about building a distributed system. This book will save you time.

Now - roll on the second revision!! :-)

Sean O Sullivan, Professional Services, IONA Technologies

I highly recommend this book for anyone plannning to build a large-scale Corba System. It covers many important topics which I'm sure any developer will find useful. The chapters on Managing Server Resources, Load Balancing and Fault Tolerence are very good. This book also gives you very good guidelines on good IDL design which can have a huge affect on performance.

The best book on CORBA I've read, though not for beginners. The author focused on design guidelines and taxonomies of BOA/POA Orbs. Among other things, you'll find a good Load Balancing/Fault Tolerance discussion (form a design perspective) I found very useful.

If you are embarking on a service design project, use this book as a guideline.

If you are in the midst of a service design process, use this book for validating your design decisions.

This book is something I sure wish I had about 3 years ago. But I'll take it now. It conveys a deeper understanding gained from practical experience that the standards spouting Corba books do not have. If you have already worked on Corba for a little bit and understand the basic design issues, you will get a lot out of this book to go to the next level.

I found this book to be quite up-to-date. It spends a considerable amount of time examining the POA and discusses many of the pieces of the CORBA3 specification individually. However the most valuable aspect was its coverage of distributed system design issues which are widely applicable across different technologies.