Sams Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days [Paperback]

Jeremy Rosenberger (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sams Teach Yourself... | Publication Date: January 1, 1998

Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days is a tutorial that will provide an introduction to distributed system development using CORBA. The first week will provide the reader with much needed guidance towards the general concepts of distributed software development and CORBA architecture such as Object Request Broker (ORBs), and Interface Definition Language (IDL). It will build upon the principles of object-oriented analysis and design, with concepts of distributed objects, and other key CORBA-related issues such as memory management and design patterns forced by the CORBA architecture. The second week will take everything the reader has learned to that point, and apply it in a step-by-step manner for building a CORBA-based system. In addition to the basics, the reader will learn a few of the key advanced concepts and higher-level services that are sometimes required for certain CORBA.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Want to know the difference between an IDL and an ORB? Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days provides the fundamentals of CORBA, the industry standard for interoperability for distributed computing. The guide begins with a short history of distributed, client-server, and n-tiered models of computing and informs you where CORBA fits in. It then follows the usual format of the Teach Yourself series, organizing the material into a two-week tutorial with questions (and answers) at the end of each section.

Early chapters define the basics of CORBA, including the object request broker (ORB), interface definition language (IDL), and all the basic types used in this glue language, which allows objects to talk to one another in distributed environments. (A very quick tour of object design and unified modeling language is also thrown in here, but it's much too quick to do anyone much good.)

With the basics in tow, the author introduces sample code (written alternately in Java and C++) for a banking application and turns to more advanced topics in CORBA development. The banking application gets simple "push" features through CORBA callback functions. Another chapter discusses some pitfalls of CORBA enterprise development, with topics such as "IDL creep," the complexities of multithreading, and the lack of value semantics in CORBA IDL. This section also demonstrates how CORBA 2.0 can invoke objects dynamically through its dynamic invocation interface (DII) facility and shows how this version of CORBA has built-in support for business objects in CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities.

The last sections are perhaps the most useful for programmers, featuring a simple working example of a Java application that runs CORBA inside an Internet browser. The author does a good job of comparing CORBA and Java remote method invocation (RMI) and highlighting the strengths of each. Final appendices include a survey of today's CORBA tools (which are difficult to find, since these products are definitely higher-end) and a brief mention of the principal rival to CORBA--Microsoft's emerging COM+ standard. This fine introduction to CORBA development is ideal for developers or managers who want to get a perspective on the possibilities--and complexities--of using CORBA for the enterprise.

From the Publisher

Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days is a tutorial that will provide an introduction to distributed system development using CORBA. The first week will provide the reader with much needed guidance towards the general concepts of distributed software development and CORBA architecture such as Object Request Broker (ORBs), and Interface Definition Language (IDL). It will build upon the principles of object-oriented analysis and design, with concepts of distributed objects, and other key CORBA-related issues such as memory management and design patterns forced by the CORBA architecture. The 2nd week will take everything the reader has learned to that point, and apply it in a step-by-step manner for building a CORBA-based system. In addition to the basics, the reader will learn a few of the key advanced concepts and higher-level services that are sometimes required for certain CORBA This is the one CORBA book that will walk a developer through each step of designing and building an object-oriented distributed system within the CORBA architecture

The Teach Yourself series allows for beginning CORBA developers to quickly learn the key issues of an inherently advanced topic

Covers key CORBA topics such as the Object Request Broker (ORB), the Interface Definition Language (IDL), CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1st edition (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672312085
• ISBN-13: 978-0672312083
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,274,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for beginner, December 9, 1999

By 

A OO developer (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days (Paperback)

A simple fact about something as complex as CORBA - no one book can satisfy every kind of roles or levels. Most books try to cover from bottom to top and become too complicated and too expensive for beginner or, too simple and general for advanced user.

This book has achieved its purpose very well ie for an absolute beginner to CORBA but experienced in application development. The price is great too as it is not a reference that we want to keep when we become familiar with CORBA. The presentation is very good, simple and organised, no showing off of big words.

I find it useful for both developers and architects. However, as most of its examples require code reading to understanding, it is more suitable for a competent DEVELOPER (ie not just programmer) of either Java/C++. A sound OO background will definite help.

The 14 days schedule is suitable for IT professionals that read it in their own time. For full time study, 7 days is more than enough.

The Q/A and Quiz at the end of each chapter. provide a good structured revision for someone like me who lack of discipline to revise after reading.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Beginner's CORBA Book, November 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days (Paperback)

As a beginner CORBA programmer I found this book to be written in a very easy-to-follow manner. There are a lot of clear and concise explanations of topics that most other CORBA books assume you already know.

What's Good: Clear examples and some excellent background on the CORBA architecture. Starts at a comfortable beginner level, unlike many other CORBA books.

What's Not So Good: The book was written with too broad of a programming audience in mind. There are a great many paragraphs that run on and on going something like this: "if you are a C programmer then this is like Such and Such; if you are a PASCAL programmer then this is like This and That..." and so on. This proves very tedious for programmers without a wide programming background. Also, the Introduction to the book was what played a large part in my purchasing the title as it claims that the book was for people with some programming experience, namely Java or C++. Further along it states that a lot of the code in the text is C++ but contains "a healthy dose of Java for good measure". In reality the entire middle third of the book's lessons are illustrated with examples written entirely in C++, which didn't do me a lot of good, being a straight Java programmer. Because of this I missed out on a lot of important lesson points and hands-on coding.

Bottom line: If you have C++ and Java experience then I think this is one of the first CORBA books you should buy. If your focus is Java, I would highly recommend "Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA 2nd edition" by Orfali and Harkey; and "Programming With Visibroker : A Developer's Guide to Visibroker for Java" by Doug Pedrick (Editor), Jonathan Weedon, Jon Goldberg, Erik Bleifield, Eric Bleifield.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good effort., September 26, 2000

By 

W. H. Fletcher "billy_swizz" (Cardiff, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days (Paperback)

I had high hopes for this book. It's very readable and pitches at a good level, somewhere between impatient pro and interested amateur. It's taken a lot more than 14 days though, with chapter 6 requiring you to type in and debug c. 1200 lines of C++ code.

Also, although the text claims to be compatible with Visibroker, it isn't directly compatible with version 4.0, which uses POA instead of BOA. You can get backward compatibility with a combination of IDL compiler switches and options passed to the ORB on start up, but expect significant digging in the Visibroker manuals to get to this point.

To use one of the other ORBs listed in the book, which the author achnowledges will need hacks to the code, would be difficult, unless you were already CORBA literate. But then, why are you here?

There are also significant annoying typos. The book needs a new edition (IMHO), with POA, and distribution with a CD containing the examples and an open source ORB like TAO.

I learned a lot from this book, but with a significant amount of frustration at trying to get the examples to work.