Description:
Want to know the difference between an IDL and an ORB? Teach Yourself CORBA in 14 Days provides the fundamentals of CORBA, the industry standard for interoperability for distributed computing. The guide begins with a short history of distributed, client-server, and n-tiered models of computing and informs you where CORBA fits in. It then follows the usual format of the Teach Yourself series, organizing the material into a two-week tutorial with questions (and answers) at the end of each section.Early chapters define the basics of CORBA, including the object request broker (ORB), interface definition language (IDL), and all the basic types used in this glue language, which allows objects to talk to one another in distributed environments. (A very quick tour of object design and unified modeling language is also thrown in here, but it's much too quick to do anyone much good.) With the basics in tow, the author introduces sample code (written alternately in Java and C++) for a banking application and turns to more advanced topics in CORBA development. The banking application gets simple "push" features through CORBA callback functions. Another chapter discusses some pitfalls of CORBA enterprise development, with topics such as "IDL creep," the complexities of multithreading, and the lack of value semantics in CORBA IDL. This section also demonstrates how CORBA 2.0 can invoke objects dynamically through its dynamic invocation interface (DII) facility and shows how this version of CORBA has built-in support for business objects in CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities. The last sections are perhaps the most useful for programmers, featuring a simple working example of a Java application that runs CORBA inside an Internet browser. The author does a good job of comparing CORBA and Java remote method invocation (RMI) and highlighting the strengths of each. Final appendices include a survey of today's CORBA tools (which are difficult to find, since these products are definitely higher-end) and a brief mention of the principal rival to CORBA--Microsoft's emerging COM+ standard. This fine introduction to CORBA development is ideal for developers or managers who want to get a perspective on the possibilities--and complexities--of using CORBA for the enterprise.
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