Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I hesitate to say anything negative about this book, given the glowing reviews by most other readers. Many of those reviewers appear to be experienced in SOA deployment. I am fairly new to the field, though I have a decent grasp of XML and Web services. I wanted a good guide on how SOA was an advance over a loose collection of Web services.
This book is chock full of information on the standards for Web services and the ingredients for SOA. Part one, on XML and second-generation WS specs, is excellent.
However, potential readers should know that this is an overview of these specs, not a tutorial or implementation guide. Certainly too many of these specs exist to give details of implementation, but if you're looking for a general guide to the specs, this is a good text for that.
Things get more muddled after that. I hoped that the chapters in Part II on integrating Web services into applications would be a practical guide to this task. I found it difficult to relate the abstract discussion and diagrams to how one would actually perform this difficult chore.
Later on, the book suddenly introduces EAI as if the reader would naturally know this technology. It uses EAI and similar concepts in more rather abstract discussion of principles of SOA. The discussion features few real-world examples about how the principles would translate into action.
The chapters toward the end on best practices are quite good and worth reading. Again, though, the discussion avoids getting into examples and details.
I kept having the feeling that the bottom line was that, to properly implement SOA, you need a consultant who knows the field well...and that the author's firm might be happy to provide that consulting. The SOA adoption methodology described in the book was basically what that firm follows, I gathered.
I suppose in a sense, the "field guide" name is appropriate here. A field guide to birds, for example, typically lets you identify the species so that you can say, "I saw this bird". It doesn't tell you the life history of the species, how to conserve it, or its ecological relationships to other species. This book has a similar role: it enables you to recogize SOA acronyms and understand the basic process for how an SOA operates and might be implemented. It will not give you enough to actually go out and build an SOA or fully evaluate SOA-related software. Perhaps the other book in the series provides more examples and completes the picture, though to get know-how on actual implementation I suspect you'd need more material.
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Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl)As XML becomes an increasingly significant part of the IT mainstream, expert guidance and common-sense strategies are required to avoid the many pitfalls of applying XML incorrectly or allowing it to be used in an uncontrolled manner. This book acts as a knowledge base for issues relating to integration, and provides clear, concise advice on how to best determine the manner and direction XML technology should be positioned and integrated. The book will be one of the first to provide documentation for second-generation Web services technologies (also known as WS-*). The importance of these specifications (which include BPEL, WS-Transaction, WS-Coordination, WS-Security, WS-Policy, and WS-Reliable Messaging) cannot be understated. Major standards organizations and vendors are supporting and developing these standards. ***David Keogh, Program Manager for Enterprise Frameworks and Tools, Microsoft, will provide a front cover quotation for the book.
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