Review:Advanced CORBA Programming with C++

Thanks to rw2 for taking some time to review Michi Henning and Steve Vinoski's Advanced CORBA Programming with C++. For more information on this book, click below.

Advanced CORBA Programming with C++
author	Michi Henning & Steve Vinoski
pages	1120
publisher	Addison-Wesley
rating	9/10
reviewer	rw2
ISBN
summary	A much anticipated book that lives up to it's promise.

Waiting

I've been programming in C++ for a long time and started working with distributed applications using RPCs and sockets. When I moved on to CORBA lots of things got much easier. Learning CORBA though, wasn't one of them. There has been a perpetual dearth of good materials to learn from. Through C++ Report I was familiar with Steve Vinoski's writing style and experience base. He is always an easy read. A welcome change in what can sometimes be a twisted topic.

Michi Henning doesn't know it, but he answered dozens of questions for me over the years through the archives of his hundreds of Usenet posts on dejanews. In fact, more often than not if I'm looking for information on CORBA I'll add his email address to the authors field and go straight to the authority.

With that in mind, I was quite anxious to see their book, and quite impatient when its date was pushed back a couple times. To say that these two are qualified to write on the subject is a huge understatement. Whether or not they could write a book of the magnitude that they attempted with a consistent level of accuracy and readability was another question.

Great Thud Value

The first thing to know about this book is that it isn't for wimps. Which is to say that at ~1100 pages it will take a bit of effort to haul this puppy around. My laptop bag is going to be very happy to not be porting this tome around once this review is sent off to Hemos. This is one intimidating book to heft as you decide whether or not to buy your copy. For this reason, I suggest buying it through Amazon. By the time you lift it for the first time it will already be paid for and you can get on with the business of learning more about CORBA instead of wondering if you will ever get through it all.

Style

Lots of people have a word processor, but these two really lived up to my expectations for an accessable text. Their writing style is non-professorial and never talks down to the reader. It is clear they know their topic like a politician knows a contributor, but they also seem to still enjoy what they do. Many times reading advanced topic books it seems like the author is just waddling through in order to get publicity, a paycheck or a resume item. These guys write on the subject as if they are glad to be working with the stuff.

So what's in it for me?

The world of CORBA. Nothing less can tell you what the information in this book is. There is simply nothing else on it's level. Once you start sifting through this one, make sure to check out Steve Vinoski's and Michi Henning's web pages for pointers to even more information.

Organization

The book is partitioned into major topic areas with chapters within each. The title of the book announces the intention to focus on advances topics and, while a novice programmer would have trouble with it, a competent C++ programmer with any network experience would have little difficulty jumping in and starting with just this book. That said, it does get deep pretty quickly.

The entire book is very example heavy and the first part starts the trend with an introduction to CORBA. They walk through a simple application, presenting only the IDL and code needed to get it to compile and run. After reading this section you still feel like your in deep water then take a step back and get a more introductory book to work through first. Part I is probably sufficient to get experienced programmers up and running though.

Part II focuses on the programmers interface to CORBA, IDL and the C++ mapping. These chapters reveal the flavor of the rest of the book. Highly detailed, yet emminently readable. In particular their intermingling of the technical issues with occasional paragraphs about the workings of the standards committee and the motivations behind the design are quite elucidating. It's one thing to understand the standard, but understanding it's foundation, motivation and direction is very important to becoming one of the greats.

Part III covers the "under the hood" aspects of how CORBA communicates between applications. These chapters are insteresting, but rarely come up in normal programming. The only possible use that comes to mind is perhaps in difficult to diagnose problems between vendors. These chapter provide plenty of background and details to point fingers at the right folks.

Part IV is a look at dynamic CORBA. Dynamic CORBA allows compliant applications to assemble the structures needed to communicate with servers that were unavailable, undeveloped or not even thought of at the time the client was compiled. Like Part III this section is more useful to those with fairly specific needs.

Part V delves back into more commonly used aspects of CORBA, the services. Very few CORBA systems are implemented without the naming service and as the state of the art matures more are using trading and events also. These are all well covered, including a smattering of OMG politics.

Part VI looks superficially like a heavyweight section, but even though it is hidden in the back, it's a gold mine of information. Folks implementing there first systems of any scale should make certain to read this section to assure that they don't go down a path that is difficult to recover from later.

This book is worth the price of admission and then some.

You can pick this book up at Amazon.

Table of contents

• 1) Introduction

• Part I Introduction to CORBA
• 2) An Overview of CORBA
• 3) A Minimal CORBA Application

• Part II Cora CORBA
• 4) The OMG Interface Definition Language
• 5) IDL for a Climate Control System
• 6) Basic IDL-to-C++ Mapping
• 7) Client-Side C++ Mapping
• 8) Developing a Client for the Climate Control System
• 9) Server-Side C++ Mapping
• 10) Developing a Server for the Climate Control System
• 11) The Portable Object Adapter
• 12) Object Life Cycle

• Part III CORBA Mechanisms
• 13) GIOP, IIOP, and IORs
• 14) Implementation Repositories and Binding

• Part IV Dynamic CORBA
• 15) C++ Mapping for Type any
• 16) Type Codes
• 17) Type DynAny

• Part V CORBA Services
• 18) The OMG Naming Service
• 19) The OMG Trading Service
• 20) The OMG Event Service

• Part VI Power CORBA
• 21) Multithreaded Applications
• 22) Performance, Scalability, and Maintainability