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Effective Enterprise Java Review by Roger D. Voss
sage distributed computing wisdom
I've developed software for over 20 years and most of that has been middle-ware and distributed software systems. I've done the gamut from C++/DCOM to ASP.NET to Java custom implemented to J2EE and JMS, and then that coupled with Spring for true test driven development.
I knew Ted Neward but had not read his material or been to any of his conference sessions. Yet when I picked up this book and began reading it, I nearly fell over.
All the lessons I've learned through years of experience can be found crystalized in this book. It is very well presented - easy to read and coupled with examples that well explain things in such a way that gets to the heart of the matter.
The reason I nearly fell over in my reaction to this book is that a lot of material that is published for architects and designers of distributed software is not particularly effective in actual practice. Indeed a lot of what passes for convention and so-called common wisdom in these circles actually leads to bad systems.
Here are a few of the core principles found in the book that pretty much go against the grain (the reason being is that the very biggest vendors in our industry have a lot at stake in wanting to shove certain technology initiatives down our collective throats - even though they're based on failed concepts):
* prefer data-centric distributed communication to behavior-based, i.e., passing a data message works out much better than calling methods on remote interfaces (refer to the book to find out the reasons why).
* prefer passing those data messages in an asynchronous manner to synchronous request/response fashion
* stick with that which can be evolved over time without much headache (XML format of documents is much more pragmatic in that sense than distributed object remote interfaces)
The systems I've designed and built over the last several years, the best and most successful in my career, follow a number of the principles that will be found in Ted Neward's book. When I have a developer that I want to bring up to speed on how to develop distributed software and succeed, I'll direct said developer to this book.