Building Enterprise Systems with ODP: An Introduction to Open Distributed Processing is a new book by Peter F. Linington, Zoran Milosevic, Akira 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:
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
The outstanding work from Zoran, Akira and Antonio has been well known to many since the 90’s. There’s been similar titles from related colleagues and work, since the 90’s. It’ll never be too late to learn from these accomplished professionals. We also owe to them instumental parts of newer stds. like UML and BPMN2.
Thanks to Jordi and Antonio Carrasco for their very kind words!
This book is the result of the effort of the four authors to bring the ODP ideas, concepts and mechanisms to a wider audience, by trying to make them more readily accessible and illustrating them with simple examples.
I am not sure if we have managed to accomplish this 🙂 but, honestly, writing a book like this has been one of the most fruitful and rewarding experiences in my entire life. (I recommend everybody tries to embark in one Herculean task like writing a book—at least once in a lifetime.)
For those of you that do not know about ODP I suggest you start by reading Chapter 1 and also the Preface of the book, which can be freely downloaded from the book’s companion website: http://theodpbook.lcc.uma.es/
Despite being available as a standard for more than ten years, it is probably now when ODP is becoming increasingly popular. At the end of the day, the RM-ODP provides a multi-modeling framework for structuring your large systems specifications, which is really helpful for companies and organizations that have to cope with largely distributed systems or with the so-called “systems of systems”. Being an international standard by ISO and ITU-T, it also provides a good basis for interoperability with the IT systems of your customers and service providers, while offering some good guarantees that your upfront investment will not be wasted in volatile and proprietary technologies or methods. Finally, ODP is now fully integrated with UML, and there is quite nice tool support for writing your ODP specifications using the UML notation and for validating your specs…
Should you want to know more about the framework, please do read the book. The companion website also offers pointers to the ISO standards, modeling resources, tools, and other interesting material. And, more importantly, please feel free to contact me or any of the other authors for any help you may require about ODP, UML4ODP or on how to apply it to your systems. We will be glad to help you with anything that is in our hands.
Hope you find the book not only enjoyable but also useful!
Best,
Antonio Vallecillo (on behalf of the rest of the authors)