CORBA 3 Fundamentals and Programming, 2nd Edition

By Jon Siegel

An insider's guide to programming distributed objects using all of CORBA 3's powerful new services and facilities Building on a new component-based architecture, more robustJava and Internet integration, asynchronous invocation modes, and quality-of-service control, CORBA 3 makes distributed programming more powerful and productive than ever before. In this Second Edition of the bestselling guide to CORBA programming, an OMG insider shows architects and programmers how to make the most of all of these features. Author and editor Jon Siegel: * Starts with an overview of CORBA, including all of the features added * with details of the Object Management Architecture's CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities, including specifications in the CORBAdomains * Walks you through a tutorial presentation of a real-world distributed CORBA application working the same example on 11 ORBs in the key enterprise programming languages C++, Java, and COBOL On the CD-ROM you'll find almost everything you need to build and run the example (except a computer, of course): * The IDL files (identical for all ORBs and languages) * All source code in C++ , Java, and COBOL * Makefiles for every ORB discussed * Sample ORBs and development environments Contributors include: Dan Frantz, BEA Systems, Inc. Patrick Ryan, Expersoft Corp. Virgil Albaugh, IBM Corp. Michael Cheng, IBM Corp. Alan Conway, IONA Technologies PLC Jim O'Leary, IONA Technologies PLC Frederic Desjarlais, Inprise Corp. David Gamble, MERANT plc Martin Tonge, Peerlogic, Inc. UML chapter contributed by Cris Kobryn, a coauthor of the UML specification and co-chair of the UML Revision Task Force. MOF chapter contributed by Sridhar Iyengar, the principal author of the MOF specification. Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/ compbooks/

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471295183
• ISBN13: 9780471295181
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 928 Pages
• Weight: 3.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 2.0" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

An excellent guide to advanced features

Written by the OMG, this book is NOT for beginners, but if you get CORBA for dummies and this book, you'll be in like Flint! It is OMG's explanation of new features that are in CORBA 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4, collectively referred to as CORBA 3. The book is thick and meaty, and after a brief 100-page intro, gets down to the real business of explaining the new Services such as Naming, Event, Transaction, and Security Services as well as the CORBA Component Model. I can't name all of the new CORBA 3 features here. Simply to state - this book covers them all. It's must-reading for all experienced CORBA programmers.My favorite CORBA 3 feature is Asynchronous Method Invocation. Prior to CORBA 2.4, all CORBA calls have been synchronous (blocking). This book gives a general overview (11 pages) of the new AMI. Enough so that, if you have an ORB that supports it, you can get the ball rolling. Typical of the rest of the book, this section leaves one wanting more info, but in a 900 page book there's only so much detail you can give. I highly recommend this book to CORBA programmers. In addition to bringing you up-to-date on the new features, it also provides 7 trial-version ORBs on the CD, plus all of the book's source code.The CORBA Component Model is basically Enterprise Java Beans in a Lanbguage-independent form. It allows vendors to provide CORBA object which you can license and use, sort of like COM/DCOM objects. CORBA existed before COM. It's almost as if Microsoft took CORBA and Redmondized it. If you use Windows, you have COM and SOAP and .NET and whatever else Bill wants to pour down your throat. For the rest of us, the OMG is the best friend we have, and CCM is well worth learning.Java, C++, and COBOL are all treated in this book.I could go on and on. Bottom line: this is not the best introduction-to-CORBA book. It is, though, the one that will bring CORBA users up-to-date on the new features.

A fascinating experience for me...

This is the 5th CORBA book I've read, and the first one to help me understand how to write a CORBA program. I followed all the code in the book to create an OrbixWeb version of the author's programs. I'm very happy to say that the example works. In using the code from the book (I typed everything in, and didn't use the CD-ROM), I only needed to make 6 minor changes to the code to the get it to work (and I have never written a CORBA program before). I initially tried running CORBA examples from other books (including the Orbix Web documentation itself!), but the programs were always incomplete. There never seemed to be a step-by-step approach - until I picked up Jon Siegel's book. His treatment of OrbixWeb was absolutely correct. Thank you, Jon!

Well worth the wait, and the price!

One of the difficulties when reading specifications is that one never quite knows what the reasons were for designing the standards in the way that they are. And all too often, outsiders writing books on such matters simply regurgitate the contents of the standards. This is not something that you will find with Jon Siegel's book on CORBA, as he is an insider to the whole OMG scene, and what is more, his collaborators are all the principal authors of the standards in the areas that they cover. Under Jon's gentle but firm hand, they have all produced a book, which, together with the recent Vinoski and Henning tome, should be the two books that you have by your bedside, to be dipped into every night before you say your prayers and go to sleep. (If I have one complaint, what is this recent trend that makes publishers produce thick books with soft covers? It is most difficult to balance on one's belly, without the covers flopping all over the place and dragging the book to one side. To have designed one book like that may suggest petty economy, but to do two represents a lack of knowledge of the engineering of books.)Unlike other books that use CORBA 3 in the title, this book actually goes into all the new material that will eventually come out as the next version of CORBA. So this book covers objects-by-value, the new language mappings, the new Persistence Service, and the CORBA Components Model. The introduction makes very clear that these are all adopted OMG specifications, and that announcing them as a complete package with the title CORBA 3 will happen just as soon as the OMG is satisfied that all these specifications are actually commercially available. Meanwhile the CD ROM allows you to play with various vendor implementations of the pieces. While not strictly a part of CORBA 3, this book goes thoroughly into the POA. (The whimsical example explaining POA concepts like servants etc. is itself worth the price of the book, and it is the only book where I actually got some insight into objects-by-value, something that I must confess that until now I could but dimly grasp even after reading the specifications numerous times.)The book also covers a number of domain specifications; so it is state of the art. I doubt you could do better at this time.