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The Essential Distributed Objects Survival Guide by Robert Orfali Recommended

ISBN: 0-471-12993-3       Publisher: Wiley       Pages: 604pp       Price: £22-50

Categories:   object oriented     CORBA and COM

Reviewed by Alec Ross in C Vu 8-5 (Jul 1996)

Most readers of C VU will have some familiarity with Object Orientation. The subject of this book is that of OO technology where the objects comprising a system can be built separately and yet collaborate using the facilities provided by a defined architecture. The main architectures described are the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture ( CORBA ) and Microsoft's COM/OLE . CORBA is both platform and language- neutral, supporting collaboration between objects whose implementations could have been coded in one of several different programming languages. Crucially, in CORBA and (when it is available) Network OLE , these objects may be distributed across multiple processes and processors in a network, yet be orchestrated into a single application.

The book is a fairly substantial tome at just over 600 pages, made up of six major parts;

1. An overview of Client/Server with distributed objects
   
2. CORBA
   
3. A description of business objects and application frameworks: those of CORBA , and proprietary technologies
   
4. CI Labs' OpenDoc
   
5. COM/OLE
   
6. Comparative evaluation of CORBA /OpenDoc and COM/OLE .

The reviewer thought that the book's strengths lay in the clarity and comprehensiveness of the text and the many useful diagrams. There is no formal standards material here, however, nor illustrative examples of code. It is a high to medium level overview, dipping to specifics of function names.

The authors admit and expose their bias in the debate between the CORBA standard offerings and those of the competing COM/OLE . Overall then, the book was considered a good read, and an excellent introduction to the subject.