Book Review: Building Enterprise Systems with ODP

By Tad Anderson	Article Rating:
January 14, 2012 02:00 PM EST	Reads:	1,522

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This is a very well put together book. It includes a single example company that the book grows and changes throughout the book. Sometimes examples get on my nerves. They are either too lightweight to mean anything, or sometimes too complex, and end up distracting you to the point of not wanting to continue read the book. The authors do an awesome job with the case study in this book. It really made it an enjoyable read.

The book begins with a nice introduction to ODP. It introduces viewpoints, viewpoint languages, viewpoint correspondences, fundamental concepts, and UML4ODP.

After a nice introduction to ODP the book has a chapter covering each viewpoint. They include the Enterprise Viewpoint, Information Viewpoint, Computational Viewpoint, Engineering Viewpoint, and the Technology Viewpoint. This part ends with a chapter titled Correspondences—Joining It All Up. The correspondences link the viewpoints together providing traceability between the viewpoints.

The third part of the book is dedicated to showing how the ODP can help resolve common issues and risks when developing distributed systems. This section has some really practical advice in it. The chapters in this part of the book are Conformance—Does It Do the Right Thing?, Transparencies—Hiding Common Problems, Policies—Tracking Changing Requirements, Federation—Talking to Strangers, Using Existing Products, and System Evolution—Moving the Goalposts.

The forth part of the book is about the theoretical basis of ODP and the tools used with ODP. It includes the following chapters- Modeling Styles, Sharp Tools, and A Broader View.

The book includes two appendices. One of them is an abbreviated version of the Specification created for the example used in the book. There is an online version of this specification available that includes the entire specification.

My one complaint about this book is that it did not include the entire specification in the appendix. I hate buying a book only to have to print a bunch of extras to get the full benefit. The author says there were space limitations. This book is no where close to being to big to print, and at the price the publisher is charging for the book, it should have been included. I won't ding the book for this. It is not the author's fault the publisher decided to cut corners and penny pinch.

Over all I think the book offers valuable information. Using viewpoints (or views) is a best practice that is used throughout many enterprise and software architecture practices and processes. This book does a great job of showing the power viewpoints have when trying to approach different stakeholders. It also does a great job of showing the importance of tractability between the viewpoints.

A big plus for the book is that the models are available online and can be opened with Magicdraw's reader. I would love to see a SPARX EA version of them posted.

I highly recommend this book to the software and enterprise architect looking to improve their modeling and design skills.

Building Enterprise Systems with ODP: An Introduction to Open Distributed Processing

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Book Review: Building Enterprise Systems with ODP

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