Remoting Patterns: Foundations of Enterprise, Internet and Realtime Distributed Object Middleware (Wiley Software Patterns Series) [Hardcover]

Markus Voelter (Author), Michael Kircher (Author), Uwe Zdun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 20, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0470856629 | ISBN-13: 978-0470856628 | Edition: 1

Remoting offers developers many ways to customize the communications process, for efficiency, security, performance and power, and allows seamless integration of components running on several computers into a single application. This book exposes the full power of remoting to developers working in mixed platform environments in a way that will ensure they have a deep understanding of what remoting is capable of, and how they can make it work the way they want.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

By both building on and seamlessly integrating with OO and component-oriented paradigms, distributed object middleware has made the development of distributed applications easier than ever in the past. But extra requirements - performance, predictability, scalability - can increase the complexity and therefore the challenge of building robust distributed software. This is when details of the distributed object middleware suddenly become critical and must be understood thoroughly. And this is also when developers, consultants, and especially software architects, need to understand the inner workings of the middleware products they use - not just their APIs.

This book explains the internal structure and behaviour of distributed object middleware in an easily comprehensible form: patterns. Since practically all available distributed object middleware systems are built on the same set of patterns, understanding the patterns will provide developers with a thorough and deep understanding of how a particular middleware works. To illustrate the patterns, the book includes three technology projections for:

• CORBA,
• Web Services, and
• .NET Remoting,

The pattern language in this book addresses everything from basic and elementary aspects through lifecycle- and resource management to asynchronous invocations. The combination of patterns, their interactions, and the technology projections even enable you to create your own distributed object middleware, in case existing solutions fail to address your specific needs.

About the Author

Markus Völter works as an independent consultant on software technology and engineering based in Heidenheim, Germany. His primary focus is software architecture and patterns, middleware and model-driven software development. Markus has consulted and coached in many different domains, such as banking, health care, e-business, telematics, astronomy, and automotive embedded systems, in projects ranging from 5 to150 developers.

Markus is also a regular speaker at international conferences on software technology and object orientation. Among others, he has given talks and tutorials at ECOOP, OOPSLA, OOP, OT, JAOO and GPCE. Markus has published patterns at various PLoP conferences and writes articles for various magazines on topics that he finds interesting. He is also Co-author of the book Server Component Patterns, which is - just like the book you are currently reading - part of the Wiley series in Software Design Patterns.

When not dealing with software, Markus enjoys cross-country flying in the skies over southern Germany in his glider.

Markus can be reached at [e-mail] or via www.voelter.de

Michael Kircher is working currently as Senior software Engineer at Siemens AG Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany. His main fields of interest include distributed object computing, software architecture, patterns, agile methodologies, and management of knowledge workers in innovative environments. He has been involved in many projects as a consultant and developer within various Siemens business areas, building software for distributed systems. Among these were the development of software for UMTS base stations, toll systems, postal automation systems, and operation and maintenance software for industry and telecommunication systems.

In recent years Michael has published papers at numerous conferences on topics such as patterns, software architecture for distributed systems, and eXtreme Programming, and has organized several workshops at conferences such as OOPSLA and EuroPLoP. He is also co-author of the book Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 3: Patterns for Resource Management.

In his spare time Michael likes to combine family life with enjoying nature, engaging in sports, or just watching wildlife.

Michael can be reached at [e-mail] or Via www.kircher-schwanninger.de

Uwe Zdun is working currently as an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He received his Doctoral degree from the University of Essen in 2002, where he worked from 1999 to 2002 as research assistant in the software specification group. His research interests include software patterns, scripting, object-orientation, software architecture, and Web engineering. Uwe has been involved as a consultant and developer in many software projects. He is author of a number of open-source software systems, including Extended Object Tcl (XOTcl), ActiWeb, Frag, and Leela, as well as many other open-source and industrial software systems.

In recent years he has published in numerous conferences and journals, and co-organized a number of workshops at conferences such as EuroPLoP, CHI, and OOPSLA.

He enjoys hiking, biking, pool, and guitar playing.

Uwe can be reached at [e-mail] or via wi.wu-wien.ac.at/~uzdun

Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470856629
• ISBN-13: 978-0470856628
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,836,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK for a patterns book, May 25, 2005

By 

J Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Remoting Patterns: Foundations of Enterprise, Internet and Realtime Distributed Object Middleware (Wiley Software Patterns Series) (Hardcover)

Most patterns books are just plain junk; they're full of overhyped, overwritten trivialities. This one is not totally free from these flaws, but at least the topic is worthy and timely, and the writing is simpler and more to-the-point than in every single patterns book I've held in my hands (barring the original Gamma book). And I've seen them all. So, if you work with distributed systems, this book may be worth to thumb through, especially if you're a beginner.

On the other hand... there's a "but" here: first, I don't know if it's a translation, but the book is insufficiently edited; for a useage fanatic there'll be rich pickings here. Second, because of the first, you can understand this book only if you already know what it's about. Which can only be the case if you have already done a considerable amount of work in the distributed realm. Which, of course, may also mean that you don't need to read this book because you already know it all anyway -- although perhaps w/o the "patterns" slant.

So, I'm a bit ambivalent: the book is certainly better than the rest of the patterns literature, but who the target reader might be I'm at a loss to tell. I've worked with distributed systems since time immemorial and know all the platforms the authors talk about; and so, I didn't study it, I, rather, paged through -- and it did clarify/articulate a few things for me, but that's it; no conceptual breakthroughs, no design ideas. At the same time, a newcomer who could benefit will probably end up bogged down.

Another thing that I believe would be helpful for a newcomer and should have been included is samples of real implementations (meaning code, yes). Just looking at the pictures with arrows and surrounding disjointed text is not clear enough for someone who's never seen the thing itself. I've understood this book because I've read and written reams of such code and know exactly what the authors mean even when they express themselves in an a$$wise manner, but w/o such practical foundation the book will be hard to understand, I fear.

Anyway, it's an OK book. For what it is the cost is too high though, try to find a discounted copy.

PS. Btw, don't trust W.Boudville's review (below). If you want to know why, just check out his reviews page: the guy posts tons of reviews (nearly all five- or four-star ones) daily since the beginning of time: there's no chance in hell he's actually read all these books. And look at the inhuman breadth of his interests! C'mon, who are you kidding. There are many posters like that on Amazon these days, someone must be hiring them to post fake reviews. I don't trust any of those "Top 50 Reviewer"s anymore.

9 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tough patterns, March 10, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Remoting Patterns: Foundations of Enterprise, Internet and Realtime Distributed Object Middleware (Wiley Software Patterns Series) (Hardcover)

Patterns are one of the key concepts to emerge in computing in the 90s. But if you read a typical book on patterns, the issue of remoting patterns often gets scant coverage. In many ways, as this particular book by Voelter et al makes clear, the problems can be far harder than for a software package running on one machine.

At the most basic level, Remoting Errors (a pattern discussed early in the book) must always be a possibility as the communications channel between a client and a remote object can be subject to many failure modes. Then, later, there are issues of whether your object instances can be serialised into some kind of format able to be sent out over the network. You have to worry about marshalling and unmarshalling in the correct order. And the issues go on from there...

C programmers of client-server applications may be familiar with many of the topics, if they used Remote Procedure Calls. So too might C++, Java and C# programmers. The book's topics recur, largely independent of the programming language chosen, because the issues are fundamental.

The book gives a good coverage of .NET examples, and relatively little of J2EE. A bit more on the latter might have been good, perhaps.

CORBA gets a brief discussion. Not because it has many prospects of future growth, I imagine. But probably because it still has a substantial market presence. Due to all those poor blighters in the 90s who had to code in this miserable framework. If, hopefully, you do not need to use CORBA, you should still read this chapter. It's a salutary explanation of a brittle and inferior pathway, as compared to using XML and Web Services for a distributed application.