Jon Udell
ESSENTIAL CLIENT/SERVER SURVIVAL GUIDE, Robert Orfali, Dan Harkey, and Jeri Edwards, Van Nostrand Reinhold, ISBN 0-442-01941-6, $24.95
These folks can sling acronyms like nobody's business. What's even more amazing is that they can make sense out of the alphabet soup. Two of the authors, Robert Orfali and Dan Harkey, have shown in previous (and more massive) tomes a remarkable grasp of the nuts and bolts of OS/2-based client/server software development. Those books are full of hands-on, code-rich tutorials on protocol stacks, RPCs (remote procedure calls) and messaging, SQL databases, TP (transaction processing) monitors, and more.
In Essential Client/Server Survival Guide, they emerge from the OS/2 programming trenches
to deliver a sweeping survey of the entire client/server field. It's as savvy, informative, and entertaining as anything you are likely to read on the subject.
The problem, of course, is that client/server isn't one technology but many--remote SQL, TP, message-oriented groupware, distributed objects, and so on. Like the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant, most of us have a hard time seeing the whole picture. The authors succeed brilliantly in mapping the elephant. They build a taxonomy that neatly sorts out successive generations of technology.
For example, they classify stored procedures and triggers (Sybase and Oracle) as ``TP lite,'' and load-balancing, distributed transaction systems (Encina and Tuxedo) as ``TP heavy,'' a surprisingly useful way to clarify how these two sets of technologies are both similar and different. Later, in a masterful chapter on distributed objects, they build on the analogy by showing how a CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) object adapter is,
in effect, the next wave of TP monitor.
Database servers, transaction servers, and object servers are overlapping parts of client/server technology. Informed analysis of any one of these subjects is rare enough. When writers/practitioners can define the evolution, uses, and limits of all three--as Orfali, Harkey, and Edwards ably do--they can justly claim to have created an essential guide.
Jon Udell is a BYTE senior technical editor at large. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at
judell@bix.com
.
A Savvy Guide to Client/Server Computing
