Comments on: Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6

By: W Boudville

W Boudville — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:34:40 +0000

There's a fair amount here, in terms of the topics covered. What is significant may well vary with the reader. The book starts with a quick rundown on SOA and BPEL. But if you need more details on those, consult texts dedicated to them. Hopefully, to make sense of this book, you're already well versed in SOA and BPEL.

Both have received attention for several years. However, looking at books on these, you might be struck by the lack of a user friendly tool to compose a BPEL process out of other processes. That deficiency is addressed here, in the sections on the BPEL Designer. You don't usually want to edit the raw XML files that define a BPEL process (or a Web Service). The verbosity of XML makes this error prone. Hence the BPEL Designer is a great aid. At a graphical level, the text shows how the Designer lets you easily drag and drop processes, and hook these together, into a new process.

If any of you come from an electrical engineering background, there's a good analogy. Spice was and is the definitive way to define an electrical circuit, for simulations. At one time, you had to write a text file that defined the elements and linkages in a circuit. Then various GUIs came along in the 80s, that greatly eased the effort. Same here. The BPEL Designer offers the same productivity gains.

There's more stuff in the book. But this is what caught my eye. Rating: 4 / 5

By: Frank Kieviet

Frank Kieviet — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:22:39 +0000

This book provides a good and quick introduction to OpenESB, the open source ESB for SOA & Integration. The first few chapters provide an overview of the basic building blocks of a composite application: it introduces terms such as service unit, service assembly, etc. The author does a good job explaining the architectural concepts.

The book introduces the different components in OpenESB and a quick explanation on how to use them.

Next is a more in-depth explanation of how the BPEL editor works. BPEL is an important component in OpenESB for orchestrating message flows.

The goal of this book is clearly not to explain the basics of SOA, or how to apply SOA principles in practice. However, it does provide a good introduction to OpenESB.

I enjoyed reading this book. Rating: 5 / 5

By: Mr. Christopher Hugh Snow

Mr. Christopher Hugh Snow — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:17:07 +0000

I bought this book after struggling with Open Source ESBs in action. I was interested in learning JBI and servicemix, but I found Open Source ESBs in action to be difficult to read as it constantly alternates between mule and servicemix. This netbeans book is much easier to read, and got me started with openesb in no time. The book is a bit thin, but there is extensive online documentation to jump into when more depth is needed.
Rating: 4 / 5

By: Roger Dunn

Roger Dunn — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:51:48 +0000

I was originally going to buy this book from Amazon, however it did not contain a preview, nor was I satisfied with the single review that was posted to-date. So I ran down to my local bookstore and found a copy. Right away I could tell this is one of those books that are tossed together quickly as it has the typical suspect large fonts and filler half-page size screenshots. I was able to read most of what I needed in an hour sitting in the bookstore. It’s just a short tutorial on the NetBeans IDE. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of other book offerings for developing SOA using NetBeans.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Jacques J. Caillault

Jacques J. Caillault — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:27:30 +0000

I rated this book one star only because Amazon’s rating system does not allow zero stars. This book fails on almost every level. The language is exceptionally poor (many “sentences” are not even that!), terms are used without explanation or reference, ideas and concepts are strung together in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness manner, and the examples are poorly crafted and often not relevant to the matter they purport to illustrate. Incomprehensible sentences (”SOA always emphasizes on distributed architecture spanning multiple web services and applications that are part of a different heterogeneous category of applications.”) appear cheek-by-jowl with banal platitudes (”A business process is the procedure that an organization uses to achieve a larger business goal.”) This book brings to mind what those proverbial thousand chimpanzees typing randomly on a thousand typewriters might produce in a thousand days. Then again, I think they might do better. If you really need to learn the NetBeans IDE 6, look elsewhere. Don’t let these “authors” make a monkey out of you!
Rating: 1 / 5