Product Description

Developers of enterprise applications (e.g reservation systems, supply chain programs, financial systems, etc.) face a unique set of challenges, different than those faced by their desktop system and embedded system peers. For this reason, enterprise developers must uncover their own solutions. In this new book, noted software engineering expert Martin Fowler turns his attention to enterprise application development. He helps professionals understand the complex -- yet critical -- aspects of architecture. While architecture is important to all application development, it is particularly critical to the success of an enterprise project, where issues such as performance and concurrent multi-user access are paramount. The book presents patterns (proven solutions to recurring problems) in enterprise architecture, and the context provided by the author enables the reader to make the proper choices when faced with a difficult design decision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14277 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

From the Back Cover

The practice of enterprise application development has benefited from the emergence of many new enabling technologies. Multi-tiered object-oriented platforms, such as Java and .NET, have become commonplace. These new tools and technologies are capable of building powerful applications, but they are not easily implemented. Common failures in enterprise applications often occur because their developers do not understand the architectural lessons that experienced object developers have learned.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is written in direct response to the stiff challenges that face enterprise application developers. The author, noted object-oriented designer Martin Fowler, noticed that despite changes in technology--from Smalltalk to CORBA to Java to .NET--the same basic design ideas can be adapted and applied to solve common problems. With the help of an expert group of contributors, Martin distills over forty recurring solutions into patterns. The result is an indispensable handbook of solutions that are applicable to any enterprise application platform.

This book is actually two books in one. The first section is a short tutorial on developing enterprise applications, which you can read from start to finish to understand the scope of the book's lessons. The next section, the bulk of the book, is a detailed reference to the patterns themselves. Each pattern provides usage and implementation information, as well as detailed code examples in Java or C#. The entire book is also richly illustrated with UML diagrams to further explain the concepts.

Armed with this book, you will have the knowledge necessary to make important architectural decisions about building an enterprise application and the proven patterns for use when building them.

The topics covered include:

About the Author

Martin Fowler is an independent consultant who has applied objects to pressing business problems for more than a decade. He has consulted on systems in fields such as health care, financial trading, and corporate finance. His clients include Chrysler, Citibank, UK National Health Service, Andersen Consulting, and Netscape Communications. In addition, Fowler is a regular speaker on objects, the Unified Modeling Language, and patterns.

Customer Reviews

key book for enterprise patterns
Even if you find enterprise stuff immensely dull, dealing with databases and web pages is a pretty common task, most of the action in software development revolves around it, and who wants to be completely ignorant of the the alphabet soup of various technologies the IT blogs, books and websites are floating in?

So if you must immerse yourself in this area, what better than a Martin Fowler book? The code is mainly in Java, with a fairly large smattering of C#. It would probably help if you understood some basics of enterprise development in those languages, e.g. servlets and JDBC for Java.

The patterns in this book cover organising domain logic, database mapping and access, web presentation, concurrency, and the book finishes by covering base patterns, a mixture of lower level abstractions of the sort covered in Fowler's first book Analysis Patterns (e.g. Money) and those that bear a close resemblance to the classic vanilla Gang of Four patterns, with an enterprise twist (e.g. Plugin and Gateway). Nearly all the other patterns refer to these, so I don't know why these didn't appear first. Apart from that though, the book is very well organised. And the opening essay, that discusses the trade offs of every pattern and how they fit together in an application, is immensely helpful.

Wizened enterprisers looking for new material will not find much new here, but surely the point of patterns catalogues are to get down on paper the practices of those same wizened enterprisers, not to strike off in new directions. Therefore, an experienced developer should see this as a way to organise what they already know, and maybe in doing so, reveal some new insights.

A newcomer to enterprise development will definitely get a lot out of this, as the underpinnings to the plethora of modern enterprise applications are laid bare. You're not going to become a Hibernate, Struts or EJB expert from this book, but you should at least have a clue about what problems they're trying to solve.

As usual, Fowler manages to be a model of clarity, while still injecting regular touches of wry humour, quite an achievement given the potentially bone-dry material. If you want to know the basics of enterprise software, start here.

A great book to simplify life of application architect
If you are an experienced application architect/designer ... you'll probably learn very little new from this book. All patterns described here have been mentioned somewhere else, and has been used for many years. What you will get though is a common vocabulary and very precise and wonderfully written explanations what each term exactly means.
So how this book is to simplify my life? For every new/replacement developer on the project, instead of many pages long architecture document, I'm handling a 1 page summary that uses patterns names from Martin's book along with the book itself and it works beautifully :)

The Authoritive Summary on EA
What I liked about this book is that it actually covers allot - but only the most important bits about it. Everything you would ever want to know about 3-tier architecture is in this book - if you don't already own it and have an interest in the subject, this is the first book to buy.