IT Architectures and Middleware: Strategies for Building Large, Integrated Systems (Unisys Series)

Every year, large organizations find their IT systems becoming more complex, and more diverse -- and the need for effective enterprise integration becomes more urgent. In this book, Chris Britton offers IT architects and decision-makers practical start-to-finish guidance for defining architectures and choosing middleware strategies that integrate the entire enterprise, maximizing flexibility, resiliency, scalability, security, and manageability. IT Architectures and Middleware gives IT professionals expert guidance for identifying key architectural issues, and building complex distributed systems with confidence and foresight. Rather than focusing on a specific technology such as COM, CORBA, or Enterprise Java Beans, Chris Britton starts with the realities of IT in the enterprise: its massive size and accelerating growth rates. Britton helps system architects rise above the hype and evade the vendor crossfire, presenting a quick survey of middleware technology, and offering guidance on the IT structures and middleware technologies most likely to address their business requirements. For all system architects, project managers, IT leaders and strategists.

The challenges of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale, distributed enterprise systems are truly daunting. Written for all IT professionals,IT Architectures and Middleware will help you rise above the obscuring conflicts of new business objectives, new technologies, and vendor wars so that you can think clearly and productively about the challenges you face.

IT Architectures and Middleware focuses on the essential principles and priorities of system design and emphasizes the new requirements brought to the fore by the rise of e-commerce and distributed, integrated systems. It offers a concise overview of middleware technology alternatives and distributed systems. Numerous increasingly complex examples are incorporated throughout, and the book concludes with guidelines on the practice of IT architecture.

Specific topics covered include:

• Middleware technology, covering Distributed Transaction Processing, Message Queuing, CORBA, COM+ and EJB
• Key principles of distributed systems: resiliency, performance and scalability, security, and systems management
• Information access requirements and data consistency
• Creation of a new presentation layer for existing applications
• Application integration
• Component architectures

Once you get your mind around the concepts, principles, and alternatives discussed inIT Architectures and Middleware , you can proceed with greater confidence to design complex enterprise systems.

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