Reviews for IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems (Unisys)

1. A Great Guide to Architecture

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, October 12th, 2006

   As a Project Manager of some years I'm usually in the position of delivering something with an existing Architecture or something that has been designed already. When I ordered this book I was hoping that it would provide a broad explanation of architecture options and explain some of the concepts about - in short, provide me with background knowledge for what I do. I have only had the book for a day, but everything that I've read makes sense, is clear and most importantly, is written from a real-world, business focussed perspective. I'm impressed.

2. An influential book abut the real problems of big systems

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2002

   This is one of those influential books which may make you start to think about problems in a different way.

   A lot of books about architecture concentrate on simple examples and small-scale problems, and you get the feeling that's all the authors know about. Many books which do address large systems assume that you are building on a greenfield site, or can somehow ignore the legacies if you are adopting more modern tools for your new systems.

   By contrast this is a book about the reality of mixed legacy and new technology environments, written by someone who clearly has real experience of large server farms, big databases, high transaction rates and, perhaps most importantly, important legacy systems with hundreds of thousands of lines of code written in COBOL . 

   The book starts by discussing typical problems - things like adding new e-Business presentation layers to existing transactional legacy systems, and briefly summarises how a combination of good architectural practices and appropriate technologies can address them.

   The following chapters present a brief history of large system architectures, including transaction monitors, message queuing and client-server approaches before moving on to object middleware with a discussion on CORBA, Enterprise Java and COM and its relatives. This is followed by a more detailed discussion of how different parts of systems can communicate, and how middleware can be classified. A great strength of the book throughout is that Tony is not obviously partial in the Java vs. Microsoft debate, and instead concentrates on their similarities and on strategies which should be able to work in both cases.

   The core of the book starts with a discussion on the different types of "transaction" between a system and its clients (users and other systems), and how these relate to business processes. The following chapters then look at three key issues within this context: resilience; performance and scalability; and security and systems management. In each case there is a clear statement of the problems and objectives, followed by an assessment of the relative merits of various possible architectural solutions.

   The final part of the book presents a process which should lead to system architectures better able to meet their non-functional requirements. Tony believes the core of the process is development of a good business process model, which then leads quite directly to an understanding of the system's components and their interactions. There's some very good advice on practical implementation approaches, and why process modelling gives better results than traditional functional analysis.

   The final chapters also address key issues such as how to ensure data integrity and accessibility, and how to manage change through integration and designing for flexibility, before revisiting the process issues and summarising how the architecture should develop.

   Published in 2000, this pre-dates Microsoft's .NET initiative, the emergence of vendor-neutral messaging standards and the real advent of web services. Each of these will have a major impact on the sort of systems and issues discussed in this book, and you may therefore also need to read some material more focused on these technologies and others, but that shouldn't detract from this book's value.

   Overall this is an excellent book, and I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to understand the nature of large, integrated systems and their architecture.

   To see more of my reviews, please visit www.andrewj.com/books/index.htm.

3. Essential reading for the IT community

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2001

   In this book the author provides solid, pragmatic approaches to tackling the complexity of IT environments today. He shows how an architectural framework enables more rapid and cost effective implementation and integration of new systems and technologies whilst minimising risk. By following Britton's guidelines, any systems manager can be assured of greater success in adapting to the ever changing IT landscape. In addition to valuable advice, this book is also easy to read! I whole-heartedly recommend it.