Praise for Enterprise Patterns and MDA

&#8220I’ve never seen a system of business patterns as detailed as this one. The completeness that Arlow and Neustadt provide in these patterns is impressive. The explanations for why the patterns are formed the way they are and how they’re interconnected are incredibly thorough. The patterns presented here have the potential to impact business applications in the same way the ‘Gang of Four’ patterns have impacted general software development.”

         —Steve Vinoski
             Chief Engineer of Product Innovation
              IONA Technologies

&#8220Enterprise Patterns and MDA is a detailed, yet very readable, guide to designing business applications using reusable model components and Model Driven Architecture. It deserves a place on every application designer’s desk.”

         —Andrew Watson
             Vice President and Technical Director
             Object Management Group, Inc.

&#8220Design patterns are generally acknowledged as an effective approach to developing robust and highly reusable software. Now that Model Driven Architecture is raising software design to ever-higher levels of abstraction, it is only natural that pattern concepts should find application in advanced modeling techniques. With this book, Arlow and Neustadt have greatly advanced the state of the art of MDA by defining both a theory and a methodology for applying the concept of Archetype Patterns to business software modeling.”

         —John Poole
             Distinguished Software Engineer
             Hyperion Solutions Corporation

“The burgeoning field of Model Driven Architecture tools and worldwide support for the Unified Modeling Language are finally being met with high-quality books that explain standard modeling techniques in a way any developer can follow. This book meets an urgent need squarely and clearly, and explains with copious examples a powerful approach to building usable (and reusable!) assets and applications. Every enterprise developer needs this book.”

         —Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D.
            Chairman and CEO
            Object Management Group

This book is a practical guide to applying Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and patterns in order to create business applications more easily. It provides you with a proven catalog of archetype patterns: high-value model components that can be easily incorporated into Unified Modeling Language (UML) models. Each archetype pattern allows you to understand and model a specific part of an enterprise system.

Enterprise Patterns and MDA teaches you how to customize any archetype pattern—such as Customer, Product, and Order—to reflect the idiosyncrasies of your own business environment. Because all the patterns work harmoniously together and have clearly documented relationships to each other, you’ll come away with a host of reusable solutions to common problems in business-software design.

This book shows you how using a pattern or a fragment of a pattern can save you months of work and help you avoid costly errors. You’ll also discover how—when used in literate modeling—patterns can solve the difficult challenge of communicating UML models to broad audiences.

The configurable patterns can be used manually to create executable code. However, the authors draw on their extensive experience to show you how to tap the significant power of MDA and UML for maximum automation. Not surprisingly, the patterns included in this book are highly valuable; a blue-chip company recently valued a similar, but less mature, set of patterns at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Use this practical guide to increase the efficiency of your designs and to create robust business applications that can be applied immediately in a business setting.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Valuable in many ways. - 2004-08-03
Reviewer Rating:
Nominally, this book presents "archetype patterns", using UML and an extended case study. The archetype idea, intermediate between a general design pattern and a specific application, is a valuable one. In the case study, it's a set of business meta-objects, operations, and organizing principles. In presenting the archetype abstraction, those objects are spelled out in enough detail to create a useable framework for routine business needs.

The archetype mechanism is also spelled out in great detail, almost wholly within the UML framework. By itself, this won't be enough to convince any UML doubters about UML's flexibility. Taken as one among many UML applications, however, it's very compelling. It's also the first reference I know that gets down to cases in applying MDA - an interesting view. I fault the technique for only two things. First is a slight dependence on a specific CASEproduct, ArcStyler. That reliance never turned all the way into an advertisement, so I'll let it pass. Second is a baffling section on "rules." The rules and rule mechanisms make sense, but inexplicably seem to re-create the features of the OCL.

Two extras make this presentation very attractive. First is the mention of "literate programming," tying the UML tool suite to user documentation and design documentation. They specifically note XML and DocBook, existing standards, as the vehicle for integrating prose and technical parts of the model. Bravo! Even if their LP tools are weak, use of the idea is a real strength. The second extra is a pervasive awareness of standards. Money is phrased in terms of ISO 4217, nations in terms of ISO 3166, books in terms of ISBNs (ISO 2108), and on and on. Far too few programmers realize how many of their software requirements are already spelled out in external standardslike these, so the consciousness-raising exercise is a good one.

This is an excellent resource, not just for its business objects and not just for its UML case study. The author treat even personal names (table 4.4) with more care than I've seen anywhere else - that care pervades the whole book, and is a lesson in itself.

//wiredweird

Great practical material instead of esoteric theory... - 2004-06-30
Reviewer Rating:
Over the last month or so, I've been reading Enterprise Patterns And MDA - Building Better Software With Archetype Patterns And UML by Jim Arlow and Ila Newstadt (Addison-Wesley). This is another one of those books that I thought would deliver one thing and instead produced much more than I expected.

Chapter breakdown: Archetypes and Archetype Patterns; Model Driven Architecture with Archetype Patterns; Literate Modeling; Party Archtype Pattern; PartyRelationship Patter; Customer Relationship Management Pattern; Product Pattern; Inventory Pattern; Order Pattern; Quantity Pattern; Money Pattern; Rule Pattern; Summary; Archetype Glossary; Bibliography; Index

Now, when I requested this for review, I was expecting something in terms of programming patterns and technical material. What I got was a great business tool for modeling typical business objects and transactions. The authors take a business concept like Inventory, and they build a model around it. The model is an archetype, or a entity that exists in some shape in every business. Through UML diagrams, you'll see all the parts that make up the archetype and how to take the parts you need to build your own version of the entity. While the Inventory model is very comprehensive in the book, you can also pull the pieces you need to model the reality that exists in your own business.

There's some very practical benefits you can gain from this book. If you're building an application and need to track a customer (for example), you can turn to the Party model and see all the parts that make up that type of entity. This will help you to understand all the data elements that make up a Party, such as address (web, email, telephone, geographic), organization, person/gender/ethnicity, relationship, etc. These are elements you might think of and/or remember to include, but having the model there helps you get it right early on.

If you're a business analyst, you will really get your value from this book. And if you're a developer who also has to design the systems, you'll look like a wizard when you complete a solid design with features the customer didn't even realize they needed.

Modeling patterns worth the price alone - 2004-03-14
Reviewer Rating:
The MDA in the title of this book probably overstates the amount of MDA related content in the book. This isn't an MDA reference. There is one small, but well written chapter on it.

But that's a minor quibble. The real value of this book, and the bulk of the book, is in the third part which gives in depth models for the common enterprise application requirements. They start with an excellent object model for a 'Party' (as in a contact database), and continue on at the same level of depth for other common entities and processes, such as orders, payments, purchase orders, business rules, monetary values.

These patterns are probably too in-depth for a small business application, but they serve as an excellent starting point that you can trim to create a model that has the right level of complexity for your application. Don't let the big title of the book fool you. You can find books on how to write SQL, and generally how to model a database for a given problem domain, and other books on how query the database and make transactions. The value of this book is in giving you recipes for models for the basics of your application.

truly excellent catalogue of enterprise patterns - 2006-11-16
Reviewer Rating:
This book is unfortunately mistitled. It should have just been called 'Enterprise Patterns'. Perhaps the extra bumf in the title is attractive to some readers, but when I see big subtitles with 'MDA' and 'UML' in them, I immediately think of that most unfashionable of things in these Agile times: Process. Ugh! Dirty word! You may therefore be thinking this is a really tedious book full of bullet points and flow charts. But in fact it's a totally brilliant book, with a few flow charts and bullet points in, admittedly.

There's hardly any MDA in this book at all. There's a chapter on using a specific software tool to convert the patterns in this book into code, but I've already forgotten what it was called.

The meat of this book is a catalog of UML patterns associated with the enterprise domain. If you've read Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns, you'll know what to expect: Customer, Party, Rule, Money, Quantity, Order etc. The authors mention Analysis Patterns, but call their patterns 'archetype' patterns. The difference between the two is that the archetype patterns are much more detailed.

So do you need to read this if you've read Analysis Patterns? I say yes. This is in fact better than AP, simply because when they say their patterns are detailed, they aren't joking. Fortunately, the authors advocate a 'literate modeling' approach, that explains the interactions in plain English, and the authors' writing is clear and unstodgy, effectively highlighting the important parts of each pattern, and where variation can be introduced. They claim their archetype patterns are sufficiently flexible to cover a wide range of enterprise, and I have to say they do a very good job of convincing you they've thought of most of the special cases, and how to unify them in one pattern.

Even if you aren't actually an enterprise programmer (and I'm not), I still highly recommend this book, just for the large number of examples of how to successfully model a complex domain. Plus, no tedious accounting or financial examples - bonus.

Great resource - 2008-02-08
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a great resource for common data patterns. We plan to use these patterns in all future programming.

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