Building Web Services with Java : Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI (2nd Edition) (Developer's Library)

Rating:
Summary: Wide coverage but bloated
Review: Updated coverage of core web services componenets, as well as some new stuff around the corner. While it seems up-to-date and has wide coverage of topics, it is written in a bloated style and painful to wade thru the chatty naratives to get at the factual information. Would have been good if the fluffy bit were reduced and the volume halved. A quicker route may be to go with the W3C specs - some of these include tutorials as well.

Rating:
Summary: too heavy?
Review: [A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2004.]

Web Services are this potential hot new field that has been built out with a lot of proposed standards. This book goes through them, with an emphasis on implementing applications in Java. The basic idea is a set of loosely coupled programs, scattered across a computer network, which invariably is the Internet or a private Internet. Loosely coupled means asynchronous, which then favours a nonblocking message passing approach, as opposed to a blocking RPC-type setup. The messages are sent as XML. Which is independent of platform and programming language. So the book shows how to use XML in WS.

But these programs on the network need to find each other. So we have UDDI being explained in the book.

A large part of the book is given over to how to describe a WS. A massive standard syntax has arisen, WSDL, which is expressed in XML. Like any other book on it, this conveys the sheer verbosity of WSDL. The industry bodies that built it tried to make it expressive enough for any plausible (though yet unimplemented) usage. The problem is that WSDL is now complex and hard to learn. It is not the book itself that is bloated, but what it faithfully describes.

One might wonder. Is WSDL too heavy? Could it end up like X.400 and X.500? There are indeed implementations of these, but on only a few websites.