10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ROOM is great, the book is hard to read, May 5, 2000
This review is from: Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (Hardcover)
It's very difficult to evaluate the book. There are actually two things to evaluate: (1) the ROOM methodology, and (2) the book publishing ROOM. The ROOM methodology is great: the only complete software development methodology I have ever seen. However the way it is discussed in the book is not an easy reading, even not for an experienced OO developer. Do not give up when you think you have lost. Reread sections until you understand the gist. Eventually, you will be very happy with the new tecniques you learned. I'm quite sure that ROOM is applicable not only for real-time systems. It should be adapted to non-realtime development too. Without reading this book you will not understand UML RealTime implemented by Rational RoseRealTime. My five stars are primarily for ROOM methodology.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful, but mostly as a historical document, March 4, 2004
This review is from: Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (Hardcover)
First, remember that this book was published in 1994 - it was probably written in the 1992-3 era. The OO design world was still in the "warring states" period before unification under UML. The company that created ROOM tools, if I understand correctly, was absorbed by another company that was absorbed by another company - I'm not sure how much of ROOM in its pure form is still left.
That doesn't matter. In its time, ROOM was wild, innovative, and a topic of heated debate. It created a visual, highly abstracted language (back then, a questionable novelty) around an intensely parallelized model of computing (also a questionable novelty), at a time when "real-time" often meant lots of assembly programming in command-line environments. I was doing embedded development back about then - based on the mind-set of the time, I'm surprised that ROOM had the success and influence that it did.
Surprised but pleased. Lots of the ROOM techniques and notations survive in UML and other development tools. Modern component programming environments, JavaBeans included, show many signs of direct descent from the ROOM techniques. Still, there's a long way to go. ROOM may have been way ahead of its time, and languages still haven't caught up fully to its models of communication and parallelism.
As impressive an achievement as ROOM was (and is), I have some reservations about it. It relies pretty heavily of state machines for modelling the interacting components. State machines are a good tool, but quite unfamiliar to most software developers these days. I'm not sure whether that's a fault of the methodology or of today's programmers. I also have reservations about any methodology that requires me to buy someone's tools. The authors state that the design methodology can be used without their tools - based on ROOM's complexity, I doubt it. Also, I have a serious distrust of any programming environment that takes over so much of the process. Such tool sets tend to leave me feeling cramped, with little way to express my ideas in different terms. Finally, I'm sure it does all it says it does. Even so, the moment always comes when the tool-generated subsystems need to be opened up for debugging, or when the system has to be open to interaction with other development tools. Real-time and embedded systems tend to be so idiosyncratic and demanding that both kinds of openness in an IDE are compulsory. I just don't see the way out of the closed ROOM.
My present interest is not so much in the ROOM methodology itself, although I'm interested in methodology in general. Instead, I'm studying the visual notation it developed for expressing complex computations. Whatever ROOM's faults and whatever its later history, it's still worth attention.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
ROOM represents the future of distributed sys. development, July 17, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (Hardcover)
The ROOM methodology (and ObjecTime's supporting toolset) is representative of the future of distributed system development. The underlying concept of concurrently executing, communicating finite state machines is the essence of successful distributed architecture design. ROOM does a quite reasonable job of mapping this concept into an object-oriented framework, and ObjecTime's toolset makes learning ROOM (and CCFSM) quite approachable-- dare I say even enjoyable!
If you have any interest in distributed systems architecture at all, this book is a must-read.
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