Understanding SOA with Web Services

Rating:
Summary: SOA = Interface
Review: Reading this book left me overwhelmed with the acronymic promiscuity resplendent in this field. The authors describe SOA in conjunction with XML, Web Services and a whole slew of Web Services subsets, like WS-Transactions, WS-Trust, WSDL and WS-BPEL. At some point, this jargon acts as a conceptual barrier to newcomers. The book strives to overcome this, and does a creditable job. But it still can be confusing.

Perhaps the key note is how the book's subject differs from other topics, like Web Services or BPM. Much detail is given about this. There is one simplifying point. Do you come from a Java or C# background? If so, then you are familiar with interfaces. And how if you are coding a large project, good practice is to have major classes implement interfaces. So that one class does not call another directly, but instead uses an instantiation of an interface. This leads to a more modular and robust design. By analogy, this carries over well into SOA, in the context of Web Services. Of course, you should be aware of the limitations of pushing the analogy too far. As the book shows, SOA is for distributed systems. Which is more complicated that running one Java program on one computer. Still, you can migrate a design attitude.

But once you realise the analogy, a lot of the book's complexity can be pushed to a lower level of detail.

Rating:
Summary: Great book....
Review: The authors explain the principles and benefits of a SOA and how web services help realize these. The writing style is clear and lucid - even some of the more technical concepts are easy to grasp. I especially liked the chapters in Part II - Extended Web Service Specifications, since there is very little out there (not counting the specs themselves) that not only explain the essence of these standards but also give a practical perspective.

All in all a great book!
Nick

Rating:
Summary: Another architectural work on SOA
Review: There are a variety of architectural works out on SOA. This is another architectural book in this crowded field. There is reasonably in-depth coverage of the role of each of the web services standards. Though I find the tone of this particular book a bit more accessible than the others. The author is plain spoken and pragmatic.

There is some code in the book, in C# and C++. Though this is certainly not the focus of the book. Which is a straightforward walkthrough from web service standard basics, through integration, security and into transactions. It's a fairly short book, with each chapter at around 30-40 pages and the whole book weighing in at 400 pages.

You will most likely have to buy other books and check other web resources to get in-depth coverage for your language of choice after taking the tour that is this book.