Customer Reviews

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 3: Patterns for Resource Management

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Of all the design pattern books I've seen, this may be the best-written. Each pattern is covered in the ways you would probably expect: what it is, when it applies, what good and bad effects are likely to follow.

This goes a few steps beyond, though. Most patterns are shown in class diagrams, as you'd expect. Interaction diagrams are much more common and complete than in most books, and clearly show the dynamics of different roles working with each other. Multiple different interaction diagrams show multiple different ways to implement the pattern or to put it to use. CRC cards are given for lots of the patterns - among other things, this book gives good examples for people who've never seen CRC cards used before.

The exceptional part of this writing is the "implementation" section of each pattern description. It shows the different steps and factors needed for the analysis leading up to pattern use, a welcome change for people new to this level of abstraction.

Finally, just about every pattern is illustrated in Java code. This will be very helpful for readers who need a concretion to bring the abstraction to life. I always have mixed feeling about code samples, though. I've seen too many design pattern beginners mistake the example for the rule. They lose out on the breadth of the pattern and the many valid ways to interpret it into a working system.

The only drawback to this book is its basic level of presentation. Many of the patterns will be familiar to experienced readers, but that always happens with patterns. The descriptions, however, often miss important topics. This book is dedicated to patterns about resource allocation. They are helpful in resource-constrained embedded systems where deadlock is a real threat; the authors barely mention deadlock, if at all. Resource management, including replication and caching, is also important in parallel and distributed systems. Maintaining global consistency a subtle topic with many variations, and gets just a few paragraphs of discussion.

Still the book is a good one over all. The pattern content is good, and the presentation is outstanding.

//wiedweird

Kircher and Jain provide an advanced text on describing patterns, found when you have to code for the management of resources. Where you might have one computer or many scattered across a network that you do not control. (Think Internet.) But text explanations they offer are lucid. And the readership is expected to be highly experienced. So it's very reasonable that you can take high level descriptions of translate these into design documents and ultimately, a functioning system.

Of all their patterns, the first one, Lookup, is perhaps the easiest to understand and leads logically into the other more specialised patterns. Also, for Lookup, there is a rather comprehensive list of use cases. Very instructive, in showing that this very first pattern has such wide scope. As in LDAP, CORBA, UDDI, JNDI, Jini and p2p implementations like JXTA. All these have some variant of Lookup as a core and non-trivial central feature. Yet this may be the simplest pattern of the book!

A good treatment, to motivate you to continue further and appreciate the other patterns.

Resource management, the topic is not new. Some people presented a pattern or two in this area, but what makes this book stand out is it is weaving all these patterns together to a pattern language.

The book groups the patterns in three categories, resource acquisition, resource lifecycle and resource release. It also provides two case studies. The book only has about 250 pages, yet it provides an extensive coverage of the sphere of resource management.

For today's high capability enterprise applications development, resource management is more important than ever before. Resource is not limited to low-level things like CPU power, thread, memory, connections, etc., it also includes components or services accessed by remote client. Enterprise application developer will find this book an indispensable reference for developing efficient, stable, scalable predictable and accessible applications by effective resource management.