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CORBA Distributed Objects - Using Orbix by Sean Baker Recommended

ISBN: 0 201 92475 7       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 518pp       Price: £27-95

Categories:   object oriented     unix     CORBA and COM

Reviewed by Rob Henley in C Vu 10-4 (May 1998)

The Distributed Objects Survival Guide , published by Wiley.

The text is clear, though there seems to have been a certain amount of editorial carelessness (the occasional spelling mistake, scrambled sentence etc). Some of the material is repeated, though I actually found this helpful since there is quite a lot of CORBA specific terminology to get used to.

The core of the book describes CORBA IDL and the C++ code generated for client and server. A single straightforward example runs through the book. This makes it easy to follow; though I think some subsidiary examples would have added some more interest. I couldn't find the actual code on the Iona Web site, but excerpts from the book (including much of the source) is available at http://www.iona.com/profserv/book/. A further example is covered briefly at the end of the book.

One aspect I think particularly useful is a full treatment of storage allocation and deallocation. It's crucial in a distributed architecture to know who owns the data! Although the book specifically covers the Iona ORB and related products such as OrbixTalk, it is always clear which features are CORBA compliant and which are Orbix specific. Major areas covered include both static and dynamic calls, use of the Interface Repository, Naming Service and other CORBA services.

The book is reasonably priced and is the first truly intelligible guide I have seen to cover the mechanics of writing CORBA systems.