Programming Mobile Objects With Java

by Jeff Nelson

The Barnes & Noble Review

Traditionally, objects communicated with each other by exchanging raw data. Today, the objects themselves are on the move. Application designers are discovering the benefits of having their applications exchange complete objects, including state and implementation. You can add features, change user interfaces, implement bug fixes on the fly; provide smarter load balancing and management; objects can even broadcast copies of themselves to provide for state replication and fault tolerance. The potential applications are mind-boggling.

Programming Mobile Objects is the first complete guide to liberating your objects from their shackles. You'll look at Java's built-in features for enabling mobility, such as object serialization and RMI — and the limits of those features. While this is a Java book, there's also an even-handed overview of how Microsoft's COM and DCOM offerings fit into the mobile object universe.

You'll compare new tools for building mobile objects, including Visigenic's Caffeine, and the even more advanced ObjectSpace Voyager, which can even multicast requests to multiple objects and remotely construct objects on remote hosts. There's coverage of clustering; and a good look at the crucial issue of security (in the wake of the macro virus Melissa, imagine insecure mobile objects broadcasting themselves to millions of computers across the Internet).

The second half of the book focuses on design patterns for mobile objects, demonstrating mobile object techniques and solutions that are proving themselves in practice, including a collaborative version oftheclassic Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern; remote and smart proxy patterns; object group and replication patterns; federated servers; and more. The CD-ROM contains complete Java code for all 13 patterns plus a boatload of object development tools, some trialware and some free.

Leading-edge explanations of component technology have a reputation for being fuzzy (remember how hard it was to figure out what Microsoft was driving at with OLE?) It's a relief that the first popular book on mobile objects is this readable — and this useful. — Review by Bill Camarda (Contributing Editor)

601 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 1999