SOAP Programming with Java

Rating:
Summary: Not many insights. Dry and tedious to read.
Review: It's a struggle to penetrate this book. I got halfway through a few times and forgot what SOAP was, or forgot why I wanted to know; that's dull stuff. The book suffers from poor editorial direction, uninspired technical writing and a catch-all approach to content.

For starters, the title is misleading. There's enough coverage of supporting, overlapping, and competing technologies -- including a whole chapter on .NET's "position" in the market -- that the book primarily feels like a technology overview. I counted about 40 XML/SOAP listings ("snooped sessions") in the main text. Some of them are 1-2 pages long; I'm supposed to want to read them? No line numbers, no boldface: what am I supposed to learn? How does this relate to programming SOAP? The author often doesn't say.

I also counted 80 or so hyperlinks in the main text. Some are duplicates, but most send you off to the site for some spec or a tool or a SOAP-crazy vendor. It feels pointless to read the book without a browser open and waiting. In particular, the section on deploying a SOAP-ready server gives links to instructions when it should explain; if you aren't sure how to set up a server, these instructions won't help, because each only tells you how to set up one piece of the puzzle.

The author doesn't seem engaged with the subject, which makes some chapters tough reading. He's going through the motions, even diligently, but why? Sme of his client-server protocol transcripts aren't inherently meaningful but he leaves them that way. Then there are pages of term definitions for XML and SOAP; did he try to digest anything for the reader's benefit? The Java stuff doesn't even start until p. 81.

SOAP is formative and there's too much going on to track it all; ok. It's the author's to maintain interest and focus, and avoid regurgitating information. The author probably shouldn't say that SOAP isn't likely to replace anything else. Why, then, would we buy this book? For the XML anatomy lesson?

There's a CD-ROM in the back, but I couldn't get myself to bother playing with it.

Rating:
Summary: Technology Review Only - Little Practical Information
Review: This book does not really explain HOW to develop SOAP applications. Instead, it just spends page after page describing all the different technologies competing in the SOAP and web services arena. Upon completing reading this book, I had a much better understanding of what was happening in the chaotic development of SOAP, but I would not be able to develop anything using SOAP. This seems to be typical of this author's other books. I've read three of Brogden's books and they all tend to get bogged down in specification versions, generic overviews of APIs, and other occassionally interesting but not usually very useful informaiton. Then he doesn't take the time to carefully explain HOW to use the technologies in a practical way. This will be my last Brogden book.

Rating:
Summary: Trivial coverage of actual SOAP topics
Review: This book started good with a description of the SOAP protocol and entry-level programming discussion with examples for the Apache SOAP API. However by page 100 (out of 377), the book quickly loses its technical value.

After introducing extremely basic uses of SOAP (passing only primitives to methods/functions that take only primitives as arguments), instead of jumping into more complex SOAP issues (different kinds of API's available like GLUE or IdooXoap with different call paradigms) or more complex examples (I would've liked a more concrete examples of using Apache SOAP with complex, nested datatypes or paradigms for programmatic security using UDDI as an case study) it instead jumps into a myriad of Java technologies which can be trivially adapted to utilize SOAP as an RPC transport protocol.

Basically any Java technology that does RPC or can transfer a chunk of text can be "adapted" to use SOAP. The author gives considerable coverage of orthogonal Java technologies like JavaSpaces, JMS, and JavaMail which are interesting, but don't actually demonstrate any additional complex uses of SOAP. If the book taught details of using complex SOAP API's in a transport independent way, I could pick up a separate book on JMS, JavaMail, etc... and quickly get started writing real-world apps.

Instead, I get coverage of the same trivial SOAP topics over and over again. While they are supposed to be in "different environments," the actual core code is still the same, as are the SOAP-based issues and pitfalls that are left unspoken.

This book would only be suitable to someone was a total beginner in both the Java AND SOAP worlds. If you have any significant knowledge of one of these two topics, you'd likely find more than 60% of the book to be of little value.

I still might considering keeping the book as a lightweight summary of various Java technologies, since the author does write in a clear and understandable way. He has a good presentation style and his prose is very readable. However, I cannot justify keeping a book of this cost that has only 100 pages of hardcore content in it.

Rating:
Summary: Hmmm, I rather liked it
Review: While I believe the review by corporateprogrammer below was right on, my criteria for judging a useful book is rather different than his in that if I find a single chapter of unique use in a book I will often buy it and find it useful. My time is worth more than the price of this book and it definately saved me several hours of working some things out for myself.

While I would never recommend this as a first book about SOAP, I found Chapter 8 very useful and also enjoyed Chapters 4, 5, 12, and 13. In my judgement Chapter 8 (SOAP over JMS and SOAP over Javaspaces) alone justified the purchase.

My judgement is that this book belongs on the bookshelf of every programmer who aspires to become a Web Services expert.