Instant CORBA [Paperback]

Robert Orfali (Author), Dan Harkey (Author), Jeri Edwards (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997 | ISBN-10: 0471183334 | ISBN-13: 978-0471183334

Distributed CORBA Objects have found their killer app. It's the Object Web-or the marriage of distributed objects and the Internet. The major computing companies-including Sun, JavaSoft, IBM, Netscape, Apple, Oracle, BEA, and HP-have chosen CORBA IIOP as their common way to connect distributed objects across the Internet and intranets. Consequently, CORBA is about to become as ubiquitous as TCP/IP.

Instant CORBA is your quick guide to understanding this revolutionary new technology. If you're in a real hurry, this book even provides a condensed tour that will make you CORBA literate in four hours or less.

Written in a friendly and witty style, this comprehensive book covers:
* The Object Web-or how CORBA/IIOP, Java, and the Internet are coming together
* Everything you need to know about a CORBA 2.0 ORB
* The 15 CORBA Object Services-including Transactions, Trader, Security, Naming, Events, Time, and Collections. These services provide the next step in the evolution of distributed objects.
* CORBA's Dynamic Object Facilities such as Callbacks, Dynamic Invocations, Object Introspection, and the Interface Repository
* Next-generation ORB technology-including CORBA 3.0's. Messaging, Pass-by-Value, and Server-Side Frameworks
* The marriage of CORBA with MOM and TP Monitors
* Forthcoming CORBA attractions such as mobile agents, shippable places, and the business object framework
* Products such as Iona's OrbixWeb, Netscape/Visigenic's VisiBroker, and Sun's NEO/JOE.

The authors have written many best-selling books, including The Essential Distributed Objects Survival Guide and The Essential Client/Server

Survival Guide, Second Edition, which won Software Development's Jolt Award for the best book of 1994, in its first edition. Their most recent book is Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

First published in 1997, Instant CORBA provides a solid, extremely readable introduction to the world of distributed objects using CORBA and Java on the Web. Written by three CORBA experts, this book remains an extremely approachable introduction to CORBA basics for any manager or programmer trying to make sense of distributed computing using CORBA objects, Java, and the Internet.

The best thing about this book is its remarkably friendly explanation of the basics of CORBA, along with appropriate detail on what distributed objects are and what advantages they offer for distributed computing on the middle tier. There is excellent material on built-in CORBA interfaces (called CORBAservices), including the basics of creating and managing objects, as well as using transactions with the Object Transaction Service (OTS). For over a dozen CORBA services, the authors provide nicely readable scenarios (rendered in sequence diagrams) for the use and interaction of CORBA objects and services. (Another standout here is a long chapter on security in a distributed setting, including a discussion of authentication, audit trails, and non-repudiation, an essential legal requirement of e- commerce.)

Though some of this enthusiastically written book's prognostications (such as the ascendancy of CORBA-based "intergalactic objects" and "shippable places" on the Web) haven't quite come to pass, the strengths of Java and CORBA are indeed more and more obvious to many organizations. Though it shows off a few gray hairs here and there (with quite a few references to CORBA products from 1996-97), Instant CORBA still manages to deliver a lively presentation of CORBA fundamentals suitable for any manager or programmer who wants a thorough primer on this truly exciting technology. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: CORBA basics, business objects, CORBA on the Web, Java ORBs, static and dynamic methods, Basic Object Adapter (BOA), IDL, CORBAservices, Naming, Life Cycle and Event Services, Object Trader, Object Transaction Service (OTS), security (authentication, audit trails, non-repudiation), Persistent Object Service (POS), Query and Collection Services, Relationship and Time Services, Licensing and Property Services, CORBA 3, and compound document standards.

From the Publisher

Written by authors who are regarded as Distributed Objects and CORBA gurus, this book describes CORBA fundamentals in an easy-to-understand way, providing key information that managers and sales staff need to know (such as what all the CORBA acronyms mean). It also explains the connection between CORBA, Java, and the Web.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 313 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471183334
• ISBN-13: 978-0471183334
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,201,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Orfali and his soulmate of thirty years, Jeri, were both in the computer software field in the early days of Silicon Valley. They co-authored three best-selling software books and went together on several world tours to promote their technology. Jeri was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, in 1999, shortly after they moved to Hawaii.

Jeri and Robert spent the next 10 years fighting Jeri's cancer and learning how to live with it. Jeri even learned how to surf during her chemo years. She went from "Silicon Valley Executive Woman of the Year" to "Waikiki Surfer Chick." Jeri received one of the most moving surfer funerals ever. Her ashes are in the ocean at Waikiki.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Old, Tacky, And Clearly Written, August 20, 2000

By 

Thomas E. Denham (Alpharetta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Instant CORBA (Paperback)

I needed to understand CORBA very quickly. This was the onlybook on the shelf at my local bookstore that did not seem way too complex for a beginner so I bought it. I had done a quick Internet search on CORBA and found a six-page overview that was several years old. I am afraid that Instant Corba was only a little more useful than those pages.

The book is current through 1996 technology and that was a long, long time ago (as of August 2000). If the authors had concentrated on concepts and ideas rather than getting tangled up with then current commercial implementations of CORBA the book would have more lasting value. To be fair, they do provide a clear overview of CORBA concepts and mechanisms. And considering that CORBA 3 is at hand while this book is from the era of CORBA 1 it does a good job of providing a grasp of what distributed object architecture and request brokering is about.

If you need a high level over view it works. I thought the technical sections were great for teaching a manager what CORBA details involve but they were too high level to help if you need to actually code something...

I guess I got what I wanted from this book. The reason it does not get a higher rating from me as an introduction is that it was tacky when it was brand new with it's theme of being a Martian report on CORBA, an intergalactic client/server web technology. And the cutesy stuff only worsened with age. Since it is an introduction the authors should have done a better job of choosing and explaining their vocabulary. Talking about information blobs and object webs with enthusiasm does not really help a beginner to understand what the industry is doing with object sharing to facilitate access to services. The book talks about middleware frequently and I think they should have presented that as a concept and worked on it's definition. Finally, the authors kept moving in and out of discussing then current products. The book frequently sounds like a marketing spiel and yet new ones replaced these products years ago. Weren't they familiar with upgrades, mergers, and market failures in 1996?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended for a good overall understanding of CORBA, October 31, 1997

By 

Roger A. Knopf "makes sawdust in spare time" (Menlo Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Instant CORBA (Paperback)

This book covers CORBA both at a high level as well as in the details. Not only does it give a good view of CORBA but represents the thinking of the industry overall as to the proper architecture for component-based applications in the Internet age. It will not teach you how to program using CORBA but will prepare a designer or programmer for CORBA-based systems. I recommended this book to our training department as a text for a network computing architecture course.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Irritating style, inferior writing, out of date, April 27, 2000

By 

John Peter O'connor - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Instant CORBA (Paperback)

First, a word about style. If you are irritated by the idea of a book that tries really hard to be all about funny little Martians being blown away by the sheer coolness of CORBA on the internet then do not touch this book. It's not clever, it's not funny and unlike John Gray's books, it does not serve a purpose of illustrating any particular concepts.

Next, a word about the title. It is misleading. The book is about CORBA applications distributed over the internet to form what the authors refer to as the Object Web. If you want a book to tell you about using CORBA in another contect, then this is the wrong book.

The book is split into four parts with a recommendation that reading parts 1 and 4 will give a non-technical introduction to CORBA and that parts 2 and 3 form more technical material which may be skipped.

Well, if that is the case, why not put the fourth part after the first and before the two technical sections?

The non-technical sections of the book contain little other than lists of suppliers and a claim that the web will soon be based almost entirely on CORBA. The introduction to CORBA that they give is inferior to that in most other CORBA books and now out of date

The sections that are claimed to be technical are not. They are really just introductory concepts that are necessary before embarking on a book on CORBA programming. Having said that, they do provide a better introduction than many dedicated programming books.

Finally, the index is very poor. When I tried to use it, I found more entries were in error than correct and I gave up on it.