Building Enterprise Systems with ODP: An Introduction to Open Distributed Processing is a new book by Peter F. LiningtonZoran MilosevicAkira Tanaka and Antonio Vallecillo that “sets out a systematic approach to the design of large complex distributed systems, such as enterprise systems, using the concepts and mechanisms defined by the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (ODP). It is not limited to any single tool or design method, but concentrates on the key choices that make an architectural design robust and long-lived.”

IMHO, the book covers the very important gap of offering an  introduction to the specification and design of enterprise systems,  something that it’s usually ignored in Software Engineering courses in most universities. As the authors say, “it explains the benefits of using viewpoints to produce simpler and more flexible designs, and how the ODP ideas can be applied to modern movements towards service engineering, open enterprise and cloud computing”.

Another important contribution is to show how current modeling techniques can be used/integrated in the definition of such systems. For instance, the book provides a UML4ODP Profile to facilitate their definition.

I’ve not read (yet) the book myself but given the authors I absolutely (blindly) recommend it. In fact, even if I’ve not read it, I can confirm that their approach works very well as base material in a distributed software engineering course. Our successful experience in using RM-ODP as a model-based approach for the development of enterprise systems is explained here (if you are interested in reading the paper and have no ACM access just let me know).

Interested? You can buy the book from Amazon:

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