IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems

The challenges of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale, distributed enterprise systems are truly daunting. Written by and for IT professionals, IT Architectures and Middleware, Second Edition, will help you rise above the conflicts of new business objectives, new technologies, and vendor wars, allowing you to think clearly and productively about the particular challenges you face.

This book focuses on the essential principles and priorities of system design and emphasizes the new requirements emerging from the rise of e-commerce and distributed, integrated systems. It offers a concise overview of middleware technology alternatives and distributed systems. Numerous increasingly complex examples are incorporated throughout, and the book concludes with some short case studies.

Topics covered include:

• Middleware technology review
• Key principles of distributed systems: resiliency, performance and scalability, security, and systems management
• Information access requirements and data consistency
• Application integration design
• Recasting existing applications as services

In this new edition, with updates throughout, coverage has been expanded to include:

• Service-oriented architecture concepts
• Web services and .NET technology
• A more structured approach to system integration design

Chris Britton is an independent consultant, specializing in IT architecture. He has worked in IT for the last twenty-seven years doing a variety of jobs―programming, technical support, system software design, program management, technical consultancy, and even marketing. More recently he has been spending his time developing an IT modeling tool.

Peter Bye has had a long career in IT as a programmer, analyst, and project manager, focusing on telecommunications, transaction processing, and distributed systems. Currently a system architect for Unisys Corporation, his experience includes work in software development centers and field projects around the world. Peter is a contributor to international standards in systems management, the author of a number of papers on middleware and other IT topics, and a frequent speaker at conferences and other events.