Perhaps a more fitting title would be, "A CORBA Primer With Examples In Smalltalk". While Terry gives a great overview of both CORBA and distributed design principals, I felt his treatment of how distributed Smalltalk is implemented to be some what lacking. Much of the book is devoted to what CORBA is and how you might utilize CORBA to implement a distributed Smalltalk application. During his discourse, Terry indicates that CORBA is not the only way to implement distributed Smalltalk. However, he never really explores the alternatives. It left me felling like there were other options that should be examined.

Approximately 50 of the 212 pages is devoted to a single complete example: an implementation of a stock market purchasing system using distributed Smalltalk. While the case study provides syntax level examples of the implementation, additional explanations of how the implementation works would have been beneficial. A formal object model for example, would have helped make the example more complete. In addition to the example, a real world case study is presented called the LLNL DataWarehouse. The case study spends the needed time addressing how the distributed design works, but lacks the syntax level detail of the stock market example. At least another 50 pages are devoted to an overview of CORBA and CORBA principals, and the remainder of the book addresses actual Smalltalk and object oriented design issues.

Terry attempts to provide reasonable treatment of vendors which currently support Smalltalk environments. Each vendor is given fair treatment with perhaps a bit of bias towards Gemstone.

While I would not consider this to be an essential desk reference as the title might suggest, it does provide an excellent survey of the world of distributed programming ala CORBA and Smalltalk.

Sounds like something you might want? Buy it from Amazon here.


Tom Anderson
Razer Technology Designs
Comments: tanderson@razertech.com