SOA Design Patterns
“SOA Design Patterns is an important contribution to the literature and practice
of building and delivering quality software-intensive systems.” – Grady Booch, IBM Fellow “With the continued explosion of services and the increased rate of adoption of SOA through the market, there is a critical need for comprehensive, actionable guidance that provides the fastest possible time to results. Microsoft is honored to contribute to the SOA Design Patterns book, and to continue working with
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(out of 21 reviews)
List Price: $ 47.99
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Review by J. Brutto for SOA Design Patterns
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This text provides a wonderful and thorough explanation of base SOA principles. The core definitions are concrete, base references well chosen and contains many useful points for consideration. The key topics are covered in a logical structure and approached in logical order. This makes the text much more useful for building a foundation on SOA than its competitors.
However, the text clearly overstates the issues. The use of non-illuminating case studies coupled with needlessly complex re-definition of key terminology makes this reference sheer overkill. This book provides a key example of taking simple concepts and turning them in on themselves to make them appear much more complex than they really are. I am unsure whether this is because of the author’s desire to become the biblical reference that Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms is or if it is simply because the author wants to make the topic seem more intellectually difficult to grasp than it really is.
I do not want to take away from the value of the content covered, but there are much more succinct and light-hearted publications that will lead you to the same base understanding. It is VERY wordy and over-stated, but it is worth having in your stack of SOA, Web Services, etc. etc. etc. reference stack. If for nothing else, than key citations and consideration points.
Possibly the most value thing I got from this book was the ability to ask additional questions and put key things to consideration that would have otherwise been missed. Sometimes the most obvious things are taken for granted and hence overlooked — this book touches on that wonderfully.
To summarize: a wonderful book with a thorough examination of core SOA principles, but it breaks the primary principle of “I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
I enjoyed the author’s/publisher’s other books on the topic, but this one was a bit of a disappointment – perhaps it should have been first on my list instead of close to last. I highly recommend ignoring the fruitless illustrations/diagrams and sticking to the text, as well.
Review by Kevin P. Davis for SOA Design Patterns
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I’m a fan of Thomas Erl’s work. In general, he does an excellent job of speaking about SOA in plain English and giving examples that are practical and help developers and architects alike get started. His latest work is just as well-written and practical, and an excellent counterpoint to his Principles of SOA book.
With SOA Design Patterns, Erl has made a very valuable contribution to the SOA body of knowledge. Working with many practitioners over the span of many years, he has collected the wisdom of the industry and presented it in a structured and usable way. And the patterns have been collected and refined through a very open and transparent community process.
But the contribution to the field doesn’t end with the book. What makes this work different from other works, besides the comprehensive and exhaustive content is the support sites. The official book site at[....] doesn’t have much besides links to the other books/topics in the series, but the community site at [....] has a wealth of information
on the patterns, as well as links to podcast interviews with the authors.
Overall, and excellent addition to your SOA library.
Review by Honkeywrench for SOA Design Patterns
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I think this book shares the same defect as the rest of the books in the SOA/Erl series: it’s essentially an over-modeled collection of diagrams and abstractions with little real information, wrapped in advertising for the Erl/SOA brand. The modeling reaches the point of absurdity when models are given to depict where you are in the process or pattern, and when diagrams are used in place of concise text. (I kid you not; there’s one “pattern” where the text makes the vapidly obvious claim that large problems can be broken into smaller ones, and large solutions can be broken into smaller ones, then proceeds to model that claim with two large diagrams of large problems and large solutions being broken into smaller problems and smaller solutions, respectively.)
Each pattern has lots of abstract claims and diagrams, and then is usually followed by a snippet of an XML configuration file with the one line that characterizes the “pattern” in bold. IOW, the whole pattern could have been reduced to one paragraph with an XML snippet. I don’t have the book in front of me, but to give you an example of what I’m talking about, imagine a whole chapter on the “Services Security Pattern” with fifty pages of text and block diagrams talking at a high level about how security is important (including large diagrams that model concepts like [User] -> [Login] -> [Authentication], followed by an XML web service configuration file snippet that enables the use of WS-Basic.
I get the impression that these books are just promotional material for the class that Erl & Co. are trying to get readers to pay for. The few books in this series that I’ve read or perused seem to plug Erl’s SOA brand, plug his web site, plug his courses, and then spend 800 pages describing a few technical concepts at level appropriate for the sales team or the CIO. The technical content of this book could probably be distilled down to a chapter or two.
If you’re an architect or developer, I’d recommend skipping this book and the rest of the series.
Review by Edwin Clarke for SOA Design Patterns
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Much better than Erl’s Service Oriented Architecture, but Erl still has a penchant for repetition, resulting in a bloated book. And the “case studies” don’t add much insight. The book does serve a purpose of most patterns books in naming the patterns and providing for a common terminology. I’m moving on to SOA in Practice, which is already much more concrete in just the opening chapters.
Note: Read on Kindle DX, text was well formatted but many of the diagrams were difficult to understand since there is a heavy reliance on color-coding of the diagram blocks. This is not a big loss, the diagrams did not add a lot. However, PC and iPhone Kindle software do present the diagrams in color when needed.
Review by Melanie A. Allison for SOA Design Patterns
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There are only a few who understand service-oriented computing like Thomas Erl. But, Erl stands alone when it comes to Excellence in SOA publications! “SOA Design Patterns”, is a milestone in SOA literature. It is a comprehensive design pattern catalog that documents a master pattern language for SOA and serves as an invaluable multi-dimensional reference for developing and evolving an enterprise SOA portfolio.
While the depth and breadth of the design patterns alone is a remarkable body of work, a key strength of this publication lies in its structural presentation of the content. First, a simple, well structured pattern notation is used to represent different types of design patterns, pattern application sequences and pattern relationships.
Second, the format used for presenting each design pattern by far is the best I have ever encountered. Each pattern is described using a well organized profile summary format, which allows the reader to absorb the information rather than trying to mentally process and organize the material.
Finally, the detailed figures that reinforce the textual description of the specific design issue and solution are excellent, as are the Case Study examples. Each design pattern presentation ends with an example of how the specific pattern was applied to solve a “real world” design challenge.
“SOA Design Patterns” has already proven to be an invaluable resource in the design of our organization’s SOA portfolio that provides health information exchange services to all providers in California. This exceptionally valuable book is not a “nice to have” publication for one’s technology bookshelf, but a “Must Have”! Thanks once again Thomas!!
M Allison, Chief Technology Officer, California Regional Health Information Organization (CalRHIO)