EAI Blog

Good day, all!

I have completed reading chapters 6 and 7 of the textbook.

The chapters give a good idea of

-what types of middleware are available on the market;

-what the main, defining characteristics of those types of middleware are;

-what advantages, disadvantages and main applications each type of middleware has.

However, the book does not seem to give a good feel of how some complex types of middleware work. It also does not provide clear, visual, easy-to-understand examples on the topic.

As a result, the author succeeds in two cases:

1) when the described technology is relatively simple (RPC, Messaging)

2) when the reader has at least some basic understanding of the subject (in my case it was the understanding of application servers, transaction monitors, and database-oriented middleware).

It seems to me that the author is not so successful in describing complex types of middleware to readers, who do not have any prior knowledge of the subject.

For example, CORBA and COM+ concepts have always been difficult to understand for me, even though I had some limited experience in working with COM+. After reading the chapter I still have a relatively vague idea of the mechanisms that enable CORBA and COM+ to perform their functions.

As of XML Exercise, I was impressed by how easy and developer-friendly the Visual Studio makes performing basic operations with XML.  

Mike