Transactional COM+: Building Scalable Applications (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Aimed at the advanced C++ or Visual Basic programmer, Transactional COM+ explores the inner workings of Microsoft's COM+ components and provides expert tips and strategies for improving performance across the enterprise.

The most remarkable feature of this book is its extremely detailed guide to how COM+ components make use of system resources like contacts, threads, transactions, and objects. After providing in-depth background (and possible bottlenecks for each type of resource), the author provides a number of tips for better performance. Though sometimes densely written, this text will let COM+ component builders think about and get more performance. Snippets of code in C++ and Visual Basic show key concepts. The book also provides a handful of formulas to predict performance on a system using components.

There's plenty of expertise on display in this book for configuring and applying COM+ components using Microsoft Management Console (MMC) tools. Expert information on these tools is hard to find, and the author covers all the bases with options for pooling, transactions, and the like while recommending how to reduce the overhead of your components. You learn how to limit the use of contexts and transactions to improve performance when necessary. Sections on designing scalable applications on today's multitiered distributed architectures will help you plan for your next project. There's also advice for developing and testing distributed applications. A short appendix previews what's different on Microsoft's upcoming .NET platform (which supersedes the COM+ standard, but is backward-compatible).

In all, Transactional COM+ delivers what you need to become a truly advanced COM+ enterprise developer while making you think through performance and scalability issues on the Windows platform. For anyone faced with squeezing more performance out of existing hardware, the in-depth set of best practices and design expertise in this book will help you create leaner, meaner, and more scalable software. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Scalability basics in COM+
• Sharing identities remotely with COM objects
• The object-per-client model
• Transactions
• Processor objects
• Objects and contexts
• The COM+ catalog
• The Global Interface Table (GIT)
• Optimizing contexts (including raw-configured contexts)
• In-depth guide to threads and apartments (including activities and apartment types)
• Object pooling (including reusing objects and guidelines)
• Just-in-Time (JIT) activation objects
• Transactions (including local and distributed transactions, transaction streams, and declarative transactions)
• Isolation levels and performance (including deadlocks and timeouts)
• Optimistic and pessimistic application-level locking
• Performance issues with common protocols (HTTP, ASPs, SOAP, and message queuing)
• Designing scalable systems (including machine and process architecture)
• Processor and helper objects
• Managing middle-tier state
• Performance tips
• Introduction to .NET used with COM+
• Pooled connections
• Debugging
• Catalog attributes and COM+ administration tools

Product Description

(Pearson Education) A text explaining how COM+ works and how to use the technology to its fullest potential. Examines the theory behind COM+, the nature of scalability, the importance of transactions, and why traditional object-oriented models are inappropriate for scalable systems. Softcover. DLC: Client/Server computing.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (March 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201615940
• ISBN-13: 978-0201615944
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,081,632 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars After reading this book there's only one question left...., July 6, 2001

By	"test94" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews

...What the hell is the IMarshal3 interface?

The previous reviewer seems to be disappointed that most of the book's sample code is written in C++. Alas, at this time (and until the moment, perhaps in the second release of .NET, when the COM+ component services are implemented in managed code) a significant part of the COM+ infrastructure is simply inaccesible from Visual Basic.

As the title and the preface state, the book's focus is on transactions in the COM+ environment of Windows 2000. Perhaps a list of "requirements", and don't take these too serious, will decrease the number of disappointed readers:

The reader should:

-know the basics of COM

-be comfortable reading C++ code (Although VB or JScript is used now and then)

-know, or read up on, the ATL util classes (CComPtr, CComBSTR)

-same thing for OLE DB (& the ATL consumer wrappers)

What the book does not cover (and again, this is stated in the preface):

-LCE (COM+ Events) and QC

-CRMs

-Security topics

The structure loosly resembles "Essential COM". (that's a compliment :-) )

In my opinion the book delivers on it's promises.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The real deal, November 21, 2001

By	drowninginbooks (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews

I'm a professional software engineer with twenty years experience, so I've read my share of computer books and dipped into hundreds more.

This is quite simply one of the best computer books I've ever encountered. A classic.

So many computer books are just rehashes of vendor documentation, vague or misleading or wrong in all the same places the vendor documentation is. This book is different. The author clearly has tested every assertion with his own "spelunking" code. He explores every nook and cranny of COM+, and every sentence is carefully considered, clearly stated, and as far as I can tell, absolutely accurate. There's no "hand-waving", no BS, it's just absolutely solid. Crystal clear, razor sharp.

It's a shame, really, that the title is "Transactional" COM+. I had the book for quite a while before I got around to reading it, because the title misled me into thinking that if I wasn't using transactions then it didn't apply to me. Wrong! This book covers COM+ generally, not just transactions, with particular emphasis on the elements of COM+ that are most likely to affect scalability of middle tier applications. Want to know what threading models to use in components called from ASPs? Want to really understand why? This is where to find out.

It's a serious work and really deserves to be studied with some care, but whatever effort you put into studying it will be amply rewarded.

If only all computer book authors were as smart, as conscientious, and as intellectually honest as Tim Ewald. Bravo!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have for a serious architect/designer, June 25, 2001

By	Sanin Saracevic "SS" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Dispelling myths, exposing guts of COM+, testing one's ability to read it in one go, this book has it all.

After reading thousands of pages on COM/COM+ I can safely claim that this is the best COM+ book ever. It is one of best programming books I have read in my 15+ years of serious programming activities.

Tim Ewald is the author that delivers the content on the level expected by professional developers, and he does not treat you like a kid talking about stuff that you can learn in five-minutes browsing sessions on MSDN. He goes deep into COM+ and takes you with him in a fast, challenging pace. This book makes you read it in one night, cover to cover, and after you figure out that you got lost just around chapter 6, you start over and read it again.

"Transactional COM+" is invaluable reading for any serious architect or developer using COM+ as their environment of choice. Examples are clear, and, although written in C++, should not be hard to understand. Any serious VB developer looking to grasp COM+ at this level should be able to at least read C++ and map it over to VB implementation (where applicable).

Thank you, Tim, for this wonderful book.