After a quick tour of CORBA basics, the authors jump right in with a minimum skeleton application written in C++. From there, they provide truly extensive coverage of CORBA IDL, along with many tips for using IDL data types in C++. (They cover advanced features such as any, TypeCode, and DynAny later in the book.).

Next the book unveils its sample application--a distributed climate control system. Material on the Portable Object Adapter and the Object Life Cycle, including garbage collection strategies, rounds out this section. Additional chapters examine the details of Object Request Brokers (ORBs), including Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), repositories, and binding. The authors also present CORBA's built-in APIs for Naming, Trading, and Event Services (including asynchronous event handling), which is most useful as reference material.

Final sections examine strategies for better scalability, including multithreading and optimizing network traffic for CORBA objects. The authors provide numerous short excerpts of C++ code, though it must be said that much of this book is reference material rather than a hands-on programming tutorial. --Richard Dragan

Jon Biggar, Floorboard Software
It's positively great. We finally have something that actually covers the topic from the point of view of the standard, rather than a proprietary implementation.

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