Teach Yourself Corba in 14 Days (Sams Teach Yourself) - Softcover

Rosenberger, Jeremy L.

9780672312083: Teach Yourself Corba in 14 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0672312085 ISBN 13: 9780672312083

Publisher: Sams, 1998

CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is the standard for object-oriented distribution system development. Addressing CORBA for the beginning user, this book will walk an architect, programmer, or developer through each step of designing and building large-scale, complex systems. The CD-ROM contains trial versions of CORBA products such as IONA's Orbix, Visgenic's VisiBroker, and Sun's Java IDL product.

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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

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