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Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling
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Author: Bran Selic, Garth Gullekson, Paul T. Ward
List Price: $64.99
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ISBN: 0471599174
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (22 April, 1994)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 144,904
Average Customer Rating: 4.22 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Useful, but mostly as a historical document
First, remember that this book was published in 1994 - it was probably written in the 1992-3 era. The OO design world was still in the "warring states" period before unification under UML. The company that created ROOM tools, if I understand correctly, was absorbed by another company that was absorbed by another company - I'm not sure how much of ROOM in its pure form is still left.That doesn't matter. In its time, ROOM was wild, innovative, and a topic of heated debate. It created a visual, highly abstracted language (back then, a questionable novelty) around an intensely parallelized model of computing (also a questionable novelty), at a time when "real-time" often meant lots of assembly programming in command-line environments. I was doing embedded development back about then - based on the mind-set of the time, I'm surprised that ROOM had the success and influence that it did. Surprised but pleased. Lots of the ROOM techniques and notations survive in UML and other development tools. Modern component programming environments, JavaBeans included, show many signs of direct descent from the ROOM techniques. Still, there's a long way to go. ROOM may have been way ahead of its time, and languages still haven't caught up fully to its models of communication and parallelism. As impressive an achievement as ROOM was (and is), I have some reservations about it. It relies pretty heavily of state machines for modelling the interacting components. State machines are a good tool, but quite unfamiliar to most software developers these days. I'm not sure whether that's a fault of the methodology or of today's programmers. I also have reservations about any methodology that requires me to buy someone's tools. The authors state that the design methodology can be used without their tools - based on ROOM's complexity, I doubt it. Also, I have a serious distrust of any programming environment that takes over so much of the process. Finally, I'm sure it does all it says it does. Even so, the moment always comes when the tool-generated subsystems need to be opened up for debugging, or when the system has to be open to interaction with other development tools. Real-time and embedded systems tend to be so idiosyncratic and demanding that both kinds of openness in an IDE are compulsory. I just don't see the way out of the closed ROOM. My present interest is not so much in the ROOM methodology itself, although I'm interested in methodology in general. Instead, I'm studying the visual notation it developed for expressing complex computations. Whatever ROOM's faults and whatever its later history, it's still worth attention.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Concepts are incredibly valid and useful
The eminently practical, usable, powerful, elegant and - once understood - simple concepts behind ROOM deserve the broadest audience amongst real-time and even non-real-time developers. It has been a couple of years since I cracked the cover and I recall the reading being dry. Nonetheless, if you are considering a move to Rational Rose RealTime as a development tool (into which ObjecTime evolved), then this book is truly helpful as a reference for the modeling concepts. The example used throughout is simple enough that it is easy to grasp allowing you to dedicate your time to conceptual understanding rather than getting your head around some obtuse example. At the same time, the example is a natural vehicle for the inclusion of advanced concepts as each is intoduced. The concepts of ROOM are finding/have found their way into the UML and the "it's not UML" darts of years ago are a little tired at this juncture. ROOM is brilliant. (from a former ObjecTime/Rational type though with no association for a few years)
Rating: 1 out of 5
Too old
This book doesn't even mention UML. It may be good if you want to use author's modeling.
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