Customer Reviews

Enterprise Application Integration

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am in the unenviable position of building EAI Business and Tactical Plans for a company that doesn't really understand why they need an EAI middleware infrastructure. This book was a fantastic resource for putting together a non-technical "30,000 foot view" of the needs, options and pitfalls of EAI middleware for presentation to upper management. As someone else pointed out, this book will not provide detailed implementation techniques or examples for any particular product or technology approach. What this book does deliver is a high-level understanding of how each of the predominant technologies fit into the various types of middleware, as well as what the pros and cons you can expect.

This book aims at a good target: explaining EAI to managers. To accomplish this task, the author needed full descriptions of the concepts and meaty examples to illustrate them. This book has neither.

For example, the author states several times that SAP needs a richer collection of APIs in order to connect to other application. Nowhere does he describe what is missing: what functionality is hard to access in SAP that should be easy?

Save your money.

I purchased this book to get a good EAI education and this book was spot on. The author does a good job in breaking EAI down to its component parts, and provides just enough technical detail to be helpful but not confusing. The graphics are very helpful. If you want to understand what EAI is, this is the book for you.

I read the book a year ago when it happened to be the only such book out there. My comment, simply put: it doesn't worth your time. if you don't know what EAI is about, you will still be so after reading it; if you already know a little bit, you won't know more.

My recommendation: read the book "IT Architecture and Middleware" from Chris Britton instead, which is the only non-nonsense book under this subject I have encounted so far.

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A disappointing book that addresses the "what with" but not the when, where and how of EAI. Early chapters are weak. The later ones usefully overview the possible integration levels (database, method level, user interface, etc.), what the tools and aproaches do, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Very few examples are used and there are no case studies. There are no guidelines or framework of how to plan and select the best EAI approach. Occasionally obscure terms and concepts are used without explanation and the content is never related to a real project situation. The addition of guidelines, EAI selection criteria, real case studies and of short, pithy product reviews would help considerably.

I found the material on this book to be very outdated and the coverage of the topic is very shallow. I come from a technical background and found this book to be of little value in trying to address the difficulties of application integration. Look for a different book if you want to find out about enterprise application integration.

I'm new to all of this, but I found that this book is the best way to begin the journey towards EAI. What I enjoyed most about this book is author's ability to put complex concepts into perceptive, and the figures are easy to follow. I found Chapter 6 very useful in defining a "step-to-step" approach to EAI, and found the chapter on message brokers to be extremely informative. Overall this is a great book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

I had to get an EAI study done in just 2 week, nowhere to turn, and this book came up on Amazon. EAI is a complex topic; I still don't understand all of it. However, this book guides you through this technology, step-by-step, providing you with just enough information to be substantive but not confusing. I like the way the author approaches this topic, I also like the way he provides a step-by-step approach to EAI projects. I followed all of the steps. Anyway, I completed my EAI study with time to spare.

Before reading this book, all the articles and reports about EAI where too vague, as the concepts were too abstract for me. This book gives an easy step-by-step introduction to the EAI concept, the major forms of EAI implementation and it's major benefits. Excelent book in my opinion.

Linthicum has an easy-to-read writing style and explains each technology he covers at the introductory to moderate level of depth. The descriptions are ample for any manager and useful for technologists needing a concise reference to get the big picture of the technology they are beginning to work with. There are lots and lots of clear diagrams. You can learn a lot fast from this book, especially if you are new to EAI. I have quite a bit of integration experience yet I found many sections quite helpful (typically in areas where I had not already done a project).

Since Amazon has the table of contents on line I won't rehash everything the book covers. Suffice it to say it addresses every significant EAI technology for distributed architectures from client, middleware or database tiers, except for web services. There is also some coverage of centralized architectures (mainframe, midrange) and how they can interact with the distributed world. The book also addresses some famous (infamous?) applications such as SAP and integration approaches for them. The author is careful to not to sell his software though his company sells EAI tools. You get an expert without the pitch.

I think it is most useful to note the book was published around 2000 when web-services were hardly on anyone's radar. XML was on the scene and the book talks about it plenty. Currently though you can't discuss EAI without discussing web services. They are very useful, but my experience at the time of this review is all but the wealthiest customers are being slow to deeply adopt due to technical skills transfer in their staffs, etc. Further, the web services community is splintering into complex standards versus grass roots movements (AJAX, RSS, etc.). That means this book still covers a lot of technologies customers really use every day and will for a long time with or without web services. I do not fault the author for not covering what didn't exist when he wrote the book, just consider these things before making your purchase decision.

Another area of the book that is lacking is security coverage. I literally only found one paragraph that really discussed security and it mostly said that it is an issue. Again, the industry is not working in the author's favor. Security in integration is nothing but a problem in virtually every technology you hear about (including web services). So don't buy the book for its practical approach to security issues because they are well beyond its scope (hard to find anywhere).

If you can live without web services and security info yet need to learn about practically every other aspect of multi-tier EAI, this is a good book.