Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design
This is a comprehensive tutorial that teaches fundamental and advanced SOA design principles, supplemented with detailed case studies and technologies used to implement SOAs in the real world. ***We’ll have cover endorsements from Tom Glover, who leads IBM’s Web Services Standards initiatives; Dave Keogh, Program Manager for Visual Studio Enterprise Tools at Microsoft, and Sameer Tyagi, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems. All major software manufacturers and vendors are promoting sup
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Chapter by Chapter Review,
This book is superb. I have read every SOA book available (up until Apr/06) because it’s part of my job as a technology research analyst and all-around techno-geek. From those that I have read and studied, this is the only one I feel compelled to write a review about. AND – because I did have to go through it in such detail I’m going to raid my research notes and share with you a detailed review of not just the book, but each of its chapters.
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Nothing special here, this is just a chapter that introduces the rest of the book. Call it a glorified table of contents if you will. At first I felt like skipping it altogether, but then I did what I’m supposed to do for my job and that is read each and every part. In the end, I’m glad I took the time for two reasons: By reading a summary of each of the chapters I got a good feel for what this book was going to cover and what it wasn’t going to cover. Secondly, I liked the author’s intro stuff about ideal and not so ideal (real) SOA. Kind of insightful and stinging at the same time. Still, though, this is still just a description of other chapters. It’s also a chapter you can get for free at the book’s web site.
Chapter 2 – Case Studies
Here the author provides background information for the two companies he uses as case studies. If you’re into case studies, then you’ll definitely want to read through this. But – I found the subsequent samples pretty easy to follow and I think you could get away with skipping this chapter if you really wanted to.
Chapter 3 – Introducing SOA
Here’s where I started getting into the meat of the book. If you think you don’t understand what soa is or what the industry’s made of it or turned it into then you need to read this chapter. It breaks it all down and builds it all up again in a very systematic manner. Make sure you leave this chapter with an understanding of how primitive and contemporary variations of soa are different because the author uses these terms later.
Chapter4 – The Evolution of SOA
Finally someone who makes a distinction between specification and standard and gets it right. This chapter talks about the soa industry and how vendors are responsible for soa but are also causing problems at the same time. How standards organizations are working for soa but also competing at the same time. Pretty interesting stuff and even though this was the least technical chapter, not once was I bored. It ends by comparing Ssoa with older architectures. I especially like how the author differentiates between soa and “traditional” distributed architecture that uses web services. (hint: rpc has a lot to do with it)
Chapter 5 – Web services and primitive soa
I read the author’s first soa book last year and this chapter seemed to repeat a few sections from that. But if I remember correctly it goes into more detail and provides case study examples that the first book didn’t have. If you’re a web services veteran you can probably skip this one.
Chapter 6 -Web Services and Contemporary SOA (Part I: Activity Management and Composition)
Here he goes up a gear and dives right into that scary thing we’ve been calling ws-* Everything from transactions to context mgmt to orchestration and so on is covered. I really felt the author did a brilliant job building this chapter up by starting with simple meps and building up to activity management and bpel and so on. He really showed how each adds a layer over the other and how all add layers to soa.
Chapter 7 – Web Services and Contemporary SOA (Part II: Advanced Messaging, Metadata, and Security)
Yup, the rollercoast ride continues here as he gets into addressing, reliable messaging, security and other ws-* specs. All of these are specs I had already heard about and I think this type of coverage is appropriate forwhere soa is going. I forgot to mention that in this chapter and 6 he introduces ‘in plain english’ sections that are hilarious. They are humorous analogies that compare these complex technologies to analogies he writes about a car wash. Good, fresh writing in the usual dull and dry techno world.
Chapter 8 – Principles of Service-Orientation
Essentially a whole bunch of theory about designing services and then eight specific ‘principles’ (dos and don’ts) about how to design services the right way for soa. I had to go back and reread this chapter after I finished the book. I sort of glanced thru it at first but then found out that later chapters really use these principles. When I went through it again I actually thought this was pretty important stuff. This really is the next oo. You can get this chapter for free at the book web site too.
Chapter 9 – Service Layers
STudy this if you’re a application architect or enterprise architect. It shows what you canh do with services…
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|Verbose, Mostly High Level Concepts,
This book might be best described as SOA for managers. Most of the book covers high level concepts. In some parts everything is presented as an abstraction, leaving the reader to wonder what the connection with the real world is.
Even as a book focused on a high level overview this book doesn’t work. This should have been a 300 page book. Who has time to put up with an extra 400 pages?
If your interest is in actually implementing something, you’ll need to go far beyond this book. I’ve given it 2 stars instead of 1 because I did learn a few things from it.
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|Excessively long winded for my use,
It’s hard to understand how the same author wrote this and SOA Principles of Service Design (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl) and Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl), both of which had more useful information in a much more compact package.
The only real use I can think of for this book is perhaps to quote in a sales context regarding the benefits of SOA to someone who hasn’t heard of it. That said, although I believe in SOA as a powerful mechanism, I believe the claims in the book are less well supported then the heft of the book might imply. Other technical details like the importance of UDDI are largely out of date.
I disagree with some of the other reviewers who call the book overly theoretical: I would not give it that much credit. Theory would call on or reference solid research; this book provides anecdotal evidence at best.
Aside from some potential use to sales folks (perhaps why Sun, IBM and MS endorse the book), I think most will want to pass on this one.
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