Enterprise CORBA Book

Written for the experienced CORBA developer, Enterprise CORBA helps you design effective distributed systems with an eye toward better scalability and performance. Early sections look at the differences in the object life cycle for both Basic Object Adapter (BOA) and Portable Object Adapter (POA) standards. The authors provide a quick tour of built-in CORBA services (such as the naming service) and look at the CORBA IDL for a simple stock-quote server. The book provides excellent material on asynchronous processing and messaging options in CORBA, including multicasting. One standout section is the area on security, which provides checklists for using CORBA securely on both the intranet and Internet. The book stresses today's object-oriented databases, as well as issues of using relational databases with CORBA (undoubtedly still the most common approach). The text then looks at designing persistent CORBA objects, stateful and stateless objects, and sessions. The authors discuss managing transactions using the legacy X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) and new CORBA Object Transaction Service (OTS) standards in good detail. Later sections examine issues surrounding performance on distributed systems, including tips for load balancing, automatically cleaning up objects (with eviction triggers and policies), and replication. (Here the authors look at the Object Group and Concentrator patterns for better scalability.) The book closes with some software design issues, including how to use CORBA with Unified Modeling Language (UML) and today's modeling tools. --Richard DraganRead More