Customer Reviews

Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Interested in designing a Web Service? But you have never done so? Well, texts have started to appear; the latest being this one by Chatterjee and Webber. It has several merits. Perhaps the strongest is that it does not take sides in the J2EE versus Microsoft's .NET debate. Wait a minute, you might say! You have heard enough about Web Services to know that it is vendor and platform independent, much like HTML, which is an industry standard. So how could a book on Web Services NOT be neutral?

Well, consider how HTML is a standard, but different browsers render an HTML page slightly differently. And HTML is pretty simple, remember. Now consider that Web Services is far more complex. The XML messages going to and from a WS are vendor neural. But, as is made clear by the examples in the book, the XML does not describe the processing logic implementation on a WS provider, by deliberate design, to make things loosely coupled. But if that provider has, say, a transaction capability, then you can get into the nuances of implementation.

Thus, if for example you get a book on J2EE WS, that may be fine. But it may also be hard to disentangle the truly neutral design details from the necessarily hairy implementation.

The neutrality of this book should be a design virtue to you. Look, if you are going to build a WS, you probably already have preferences for .NET or J2EE (or something else). So, indeed, do get a WS book specific to that platform. But consider this book as a good second opinion, and much cheaper than hiring a consultant.

Over the past year, I have read quite a few books on Web Services, some good, others not so good... but this book really stands out.
The concepts were covered in sufficient details and in a very informal manner. It gives you a very good idea what you would need to consider when deciding to implement a SOA solution in your organization.
Highly Recommended!

Consider this - Web Services and SOAP is perhaps the only recallable evolution of technology that has witnessed the single largest involvement of standards bodies and industry bellwethers. The result? A puzzling plethora of proffered protocols that continues to confuse both sideliners and early adopters every day.

While managers are finding it increasingly difficult to understand the direction, developers are craving for clarity, consistency and a unified approach for WS adoption. "Give me the tools" they cry every day, while they keep adding to their "To Read" list a handful of new acronyms every week. The big question is, when can we build Rome, if at all?

With a gentle and brief (thank god!) introduction to underlying concepts such as SOAP, XML and UDDI, authors start talking about broader concerns - conversation, transaction, security, workflow, QoS and everything in between. While accentuating nuances of evolving standards and guessing the future trends, authors offer strategies, patterns, and tips on pitfalls to avoid. They skirt around the political interoperability issues around J2EE and .NET and focus purely on the standards. Architect's Note included at the end of every chapter makes title justified.

An implementation of WS-based ordering system presented as a case study concludes the book by bringing it all together through excellent step-by-step approach.

Although almost a year old, this book can be a survival guide for people in the trenches and the ROI-Savvy managers as well. It helps you tell the wheat from the chaff.

Ajith Kallambella
(...)

This is a surpringly well written, well organized book. Just about all of the major web service technologies are covered in just enough detail to give the reader a good understand of how they work and why they are needed. In addition, there are lots of simple, yet complete code samples that prepare the reader for detailed specifications and API documentation.

The book also includes background coverage of fundamental XML concepts, such as XML schema. It is worthwhile as a reference alone.

This book is much more than SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI (although these are covered in detail). This book includes advanced topics such as Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL), workflow, and transactions. The examples are easy to understand and complete.

Overall, this is a professionally written book for professionals.

This is a good book that starts where most other texts on Web Services stop. If you're really looking to see what's coming over the horizon, how you should be planning for it now, then I'd recommend this book. The text is clear and concise and importantly it doesn't assume everything is Java/J2EE or .NET based. It's fairly obvious that the authors know their subject well and want to let the reader know too!

A great guide to designing and implementing web services and the common challenges and pitfalls that can be found along the way.

Examples, patterns and case study provide excellent illustration while the subject matter is delivered in a consistent and surprisingly easy to read manner.

I'd recommend this book to anyone that wants to find out the ins and outs of providing web-services, rather than developing a simple web service for their own benefit - most .NET books can deal with that in a couple of pages.

Buy this book to dig deeper and find out about the issues that you should be considering.

Enjoy

This is a MUST-HAVE book for anyone who is interested in web services. Web service is arguably the next-big-thing in web technology. Yet there is often confusion between web services that expose functionalities in an open standard and web interfaces that expose presentations in an open standard. Not only this book clarifies the confusion, it goes much further to provide much insightful information from different perspectives; e.g., design patterns in software engineering, application development for wireless devices and enterprise web services deployment. I just wish this book could have been available earlier in the market! My overall rating for this book is EXCELLENT!

I just got this book. This book is different from other Web Service books that go on and on about one or two topics. Instead, this book looks at developing enterprise applications using Web Services and addresses all of the issues that enterprise architects and developers face. The writing is informal and easy to understand. Some of the chapters are a little longer than is needed. But, definately a solid resource. A "one stop shop" for Web Services and enterprise software. Cheers.

Web services are an evolving technology for machine to machine interoperability. What's frustrated me is that books in this space seem to be either too narrowly focused on programming platforms or quickly dated. This book is a breath of fresh air: it's up to date and deals primarily with web services as a technology rather than a bolt-on. In my opinion, this is the current book to own for starting to get your brain around web services. It stands out as being very useful to me as an architect.

This book presents the most recent snapshot of development in web services area. It covers not only the fundamental constructs of the technology in detail but also the advanced topics that arise in any enterprise-level projects. The authors show how web services address such common problems as transactions and security without mystifying the technology. The best part is the exemplary real-world applications introduced later in the book as a proof that web service technology is a full-fledged distributed computing beyond simple stock-quotes. I would recommend this book to anybody who would like to understand what the technology really is and what it is not, and who considers it for a new paradigm of distributed computing.