Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA, 2nd Edition

Author: Robert Orfali, Dan Harkey List Price: $59.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 047124578X Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (10 March, 1998) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 4,421 Average Customer Rating: 3.65 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

CORBA is a powerful and complex method for distributed computing. This book does not go in depth into how to make use CORBA in practice. It gives a fairly shallow overview that frustratingly does not have much substance. It reminded me of an academic lecture I attended where I was positive that the lecturer did not have practical experience in the subject - and gave a theoretical discussion on the subject. This is fine as an introduction but frustrating if one wants to get over the theoretical summary of the concepts and work on what (and if) it works; and under what circumstances!

BUT this book is very useful to beginners that would like the 50K feet view first and then go elsewhere to drill for more information.

Another point to keep in mind is that this book was originally published in 1998 - some of the book's information is presently irrelevant. I am not sure if there was a reprint since 1998 but the information included is dated.

In conclusion, buy this book if you are a beginner and would like a reference guide.

Hope this is helpful!!

Note the book is not just about teaching CORBA programming using
the Java language. It also provides large amounts of material on Java Beans and

Enterprise Java Beans. This is a teaching book not a reference book.
While it does provide Java coding examples, developers will not use it
to write their code (at least I don't).

Book Sections:
1- CORBA Meets Java (3 chapters)
2- Core CORBA/Java (3 chapters)
3- The Dynamic CORBA (3 chapters)
4- CORBA and Its Competitors (7 chapters)
5- The Existential CORBA (6 chapters)
6- JDBC 2-Tier Versus 3-Tier (4 chapters)
7- From JavaBeans to EnterpriseJavaBeans (8 chapters)
8- Grand Finale: Club Med with CORBA/JavaBeans (4 chapters)

The CORBA coverage is extensive: BOA, POA, Interface Repository, Java-to-IDL and
IDL-to-Java mappings, and DII among others. However, no coverage of the CORBA Services,
besides the Naming Service.

Be prepared for their style of writing. As with their other best-selling books,
they have Zog the Martian (see the cover) and Soapboxes, which give their insightful opinions on
issues and problems with the subject. Personally, I enjoyed it as it makes the
book more interesting.

Some Negatives. This book has become somewhat outdated, written in 1998,
with an intro by Marc Andreesen and a CDROM containing JDK 1.1! There are better
books on Enterprise Java Beans. A new edition of this book could be thinner
by reducing the EJB material. Its missing coverage of the new CORBA Component Model
(of course, CCM was not out in 1998).

In summary, I highly recommend this book for readers wanting to learn Client/Server

programming and CORBA (using Java). I bought many copies of this book over the years
for training people at my company.

Granted, the book is a little outdated (written in early 1998 apparently), and this is about the only drawback of the book. Hope the authors will come up with a new edition with all the latest development in this topic soon. And mind you again, I skipped all the implementation parts of the book (which is the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 stars - because I don't wanna be potentially overrating a part that I didn't read). I focussed on the high level discussion on CORBA concepts (which explains it better than other books I've read on this subject), how Sun started to endorse it with Java, as well as comparing technologies (comparable not in the technolgy purist's sense, but in the sense that they are 'enablers' for IT folks who wanna implement remote object invocation over enterprise LAN or over internet) such as traditional sockets, CGI, RMI, Servlet, and the major CORBA rival - DCOM. If you've used these various technologies before separately like I did, and sometimes felt a bit overwhelmed by all the different standard and practices, this book provides an EXCELLENT melting point where suddenly why there're all such various levels of technology, and the relative pros and cons of each of them all makes sense.

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