The Complete Book of Middleware

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 304 pages
• Published by: AUERBACH
• Edition: 1st Edition March 5, 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0849312728
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0849312724
• Book Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Review
The book gives a very useful overview of current middleware technology and products and is equally accessible to technical staff and managers.
-Nick Dunn, Student software Developer

Product Description
The challenges of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale, distributed enterprise systems are truly daunting. Written for all IT professionals, The Complete Book of Middleware will aid in resolving new business objectives, new technologies, and vendor disputes. This book focuses on the essential principles and priorities of system design and emphasizes the new requirements brought forward by the rise of e-commerce and distributed integrated systems. This reference highlights the changes to middleware technologies and standards. It offers a concise overview of middleware technology alternatives and distributed systems. Many increasingly complex examples are incorporated throughout and the book concludes with guidelines on the practice of IT architecture. Performance considerations such as caching and monitoring are reviewed and the appendix includes middleware resources and new modeling standards. The scope includes traditional middleware and also next-generation techniques that serve to glue disparate systems in the ever-expanding world of distributed network systems. Provided with concepts, principles, and alternatives discussed in The Complete Book of Middleware, systems architects, systems analysts, systems designers, systems developers, and programmers, can proceed with greater confidence in designing complex enterprise systems.

Reader Reviews
This collection of papers is divided among eight major topic areas, each on a specific middleware category. The main value of this book is the wide range of technologies and vendor solutions, and the fact that it's up to date (at the time of this review). I like the complete coverage of both transaction and queuing approaches, and the vendor-specific information that includes Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java, as well as everything in between. The sections database middleware and middleware performance are especially valuable because they are more generic and applicable to a wider audience than the MS- and Java-centric sections. While individual papers have a slight vendor bias, the book as a whole is vendor neutral. This is not a book for learning about middleware as much as a good description of what's currently available and their strengths and weaknesses. If you are looking for a more general book I recommend Chris Britton's "IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems" for the fundamentals, and David Linthicum's "B2B Application Integration" for a detailed text on how to employ middleware in practice. However, this book will give vendor-specific details and a more up-to-date view of middleware that are missing from Britton's and Linthicum's books. If you're a system architect or consultant this book is an excellent desk reference.