Enterprise Application Architecture with VB, ASP and MTS [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

~ Joseph Moniz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amidst the flurry of new development languages, operating systems, and standards, it's often easy to lose sight of the big picture. There's no shortage of tools--but it is often real knowledge of how to use them that is lacking. In Enterprise Application Architecture with VB, ASP, and MTS, Joseph Moniz shares his expertise by presenting a far-reaching framework for large-scale development that may well change the way you program for the enterprise.

This is an advanced title for serious programmers and system architects. Unlike other works that focus on a particular tool or architecture, this book lays out Moniz's own--a framework called an Enterprise Caliber System--which is designed to deliver available, scalable, and secure solutions. He uses an n-tier model of distributed processing but also focuses on horizontal scalability within each tier.

Much of this lengthy hardcover is devoted to explaining his approach, but the author also takes you through creating a full-fledged enterprise management system that employs its techniques using Visual Basic, Active Server Pages (ASP), and other commercial tools. Moniz presents a fascinating four-dimensional data object model that is bound to open new development doors for many developers.

This title's layout is textbook style, with dense text and sample code in tiny type size. However, all of the code is also available on the publisher's Web site for download. Some technical books transform readers as well as instruct. This masterwork clearly has that characteristic. --Stephen W. Plain

Product Description

This book is about delivering professional Enterprise systems in Visual Basic 6. This book begins where Professional VB5/6 Business Objects left off. It offers a sophisticated response to the Business Objects book, and takes the dialog further. It also offers an aware response to the techno-political situation at the Enterprise level for Visual Basic. By definition, the task of delivering an enterprise is a huge undertaking. Microsoft's enterprise offerings have evolved to the point where they pose a serious threat to existing enterprise level platforms. Microsoft's promised lower total cost of ownership is driving many companies to replace at least a portion of their enterprise systems with Windows NT Enterprise Server and Back Office suite of servers. While there are many books that consider some portion or another of the enterprise, there few if any that address the enterprise as a whole while still providing the technical details developers and integration teams require for real-world execution and delivery. The information required to stitch together the components essential for an enterprise system can only be found scattered across several tens of manuals that span many disciplines. Managers and developers alike need a clear vision of what constitutes an enterprise system. This book is designed to consider the problem of delivering an enterprise as a whole. It covers hardware from a developer's perspective. It provides step-by-step installation and configuration instructions for Windows NT Cluster server and the Back Office suite of servers. Then it expands upon and improves the Professional Visual Basic 5.0 Object methodology.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 500 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861002580
• ISBN-13: 978-1861002587
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,308,663 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great concepts, poor implementation, March 27, 2000

By	B. Harriger (Cedar Park, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In a nutshell Moniz puts forth a great concept, but plan on using your own implementation. Read on for the details. When I first read this book I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. I was elated that someone had an architecture that supported just about everything my users were asking for. Then we implemented, or tried to anyway. The code generated by his 'Object Factory' was poorly commented and dismally formated. It uses older ODBC, and improperly uses CreateObject() when the components are supposed to be built to take advantage of MTS. (You must use CreateInstance() to keep your components in the same context) He is also passing whole user-defined objects across process boundaries instead of serializing the data. Incredible performance hit! Still enamored with the concept I converted it to ADO and fixed the MTS errors, thinking that I would just copy this cleaned-up project over and over and edit it to support new objects. Man, was that ever complicated! So, now I'm in my third iteration (and last) of trying to implement this architecture by partitioning the functionality into separate components. In theory, this redisign should work better, and be much simpler than his implementation. (Maybe I'll write a book with my version.) ;^)>

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your money or time., February 13, 2000

By	Tom (Va) - See all my reviews

This book not only wasted my time but resulted in utter frustration. I read over half of the book before returning it for a refund. This book is a bad mark in the Wrox name.

The book it self is bloated repeating things like `what we are going to cover in this chapter' multiple times in the chapter. The easy issues are covered in wasteful detail and the difficult issues that you would expect to find in this book are not covered at all. He spent an entire chapter on how to use an object that exposes properties and methods. Hello! VB 101?

The technical content also leaves much to be desired. I believe that he must not have spent much time developing in the real world because he suggests functionality like an undelete as part of every object. Most objects I know of rarely use delete let alone a thick client concept like an undelete. I believe that his architecture would not scale and perform like a hog. I think he would hit the ASP threading limit with 50 customers on one of his applications. (Not that I saw that issue mentioned in the book). He uses collections in a distributed application and seems to load all of the data for every search. When he got to the point to explain how to throttle the data for a search he skipped it indicating it was an easy exercise.

I am not usually this critical of any book and I respect Mr. Moniz for his work and ideas but I think this one will lead developers astray.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Good data access methods, bad business logic, January 28, 2000

By A Customer

This book does a good job in the data layer portion of an N-Tier framework.

The author shows how to create classes that can create their own database objects such as the tables, views and stored procedures (although I don't know if I would ever use this technique - our DBAs would have a heart attack).

These classes also provide good functionality for Inserting, Updating, Fetching, Deleting, Auditing, and Un-doing changes to a table.

However, there are numerous problems with the book that prevent me from using the framework such as:

1: Very poor discussion/handling of business logic in the Business Layer. Every application I've written has complex logic that results from interactions between various Objects in the Business Layer. This framework does not discuss how to handle these interactions.

2: Non-intuitive way of handling Parent-Child relationships. For example, a Person object and Phone Number object would normally be modelled with a Person table, and a Phone Number table (that has a foreign key to the Person table). The author instead creates a separate join table represented by a "Connector" object.

3: Very little discussion of security. The objects in the book all have a Security property that can be set, but the objects don't ever do anything with this value. The author just briefly mentions this property and all the great things you can do with it, but never shows you how.

4: Potential performance issues - For functions in the data layer, all the properties are passed as arguments for Saving, Fetching, etc. This will cause a huge overhead hit when your objects have more than the 10-15 properties that the author uses. (Some of my objects have 75+ properties).