Customer Reviews

Executing SOA: A Practical Guide for the Service-Oriented Architect

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This book contains much valuable information, but I see little that is not readily available on the web. Just do some searching and you can find this information quickly enough. If you don't mind paying for information that is available for free, then buy this book. Look at sites like zapthink, searchsoa.com, soa-consortium.org. Also look at a book named "An Implementor's Guide to Service Oriented Architecture - Getting It Right" and authors like Thomas Erl.

I have read a lot of white papers, articles and books on SOA but this book is one of the best I have read on the subject. It basically gives you a chart for your journey into SOA. It takes you down the path, step by step, of what has to be done to be succesful with your SOA initiative and most importantly, it explains why. I would recommend this book to anyone who really wants to do SOA the right way.

This book achieves excellence on many levels, from defining business services and processes as the business itself thru to elucidation of the new RUP/SOMA process. While pieces of this material may appear elsewhere, this short work is packed with the right information in all the right places. Certainly supplement with relevant material from the field and customize to your organization and culture, but I recommend this book be on the shelf of all SOA managers and architects. I have 20+ years software development, 15 years as architect and 8 years as senior SOA architect and this book is prominently on my shelf and has been most highly recommended.

Thank you to the authors and IBM for helping to define and lead the way in how today's software development should be performed.

There has been books in the market on the topic of SOA, in numbers. Many of them quickly get into the quagmire of either keeping it too abstract and talk about just business aspects and their benefits or going to the other extreme and treating just the technology aspects of SOA.

'Executing SOA - A Practical Guide for the Service Oriented Architect' is a revealing, startling and supremely practical treatise on this topic of SOA. The first great point about this book is that it does not go into too much of the basics of SOA as a concept; its definitions; terminologies etc. It provides just an introductory chapter on its history and more significanly why SOA matters more and more in today's world of business and IT.

The topic of SOA Governance has not been treated so well if not, at all, in the books that try to fill up the shelf. An entire chapter is dedicated to this topic! The chapter focusses on how business and IT alignment is enabled and empowered by SOA Governance and demonstrates how SOA Governance can and should be used as an SOA Strategy to realistically align IT initiatives with the business drivers and goals of the enterprise. It provides a splendid treatment on how to structure the organization; with its roles and responsibilities and the management of power so that SOA Governance can be implemented as a mainstream SOA discipline inside an enterprise. What I found most useful was the way the authors provided a prescriptive checklist of the various components of SOA Governance and what to execute to make each component be executed upon.

SOA introduces a new architecture paradigm to IT. Rational Unified Process, as a methodology to perform software lifecycle development saw the hole in its existing process around how a typical SOA project should be executed. They used SOMA as a service oriented modeling and architecture method and came up with their new version of RUP called RUP-SOMA. This book is the first of its kind that dedicates an entire chapter in defining to its reader what RUP-SOMA is and more importantly provides step by step guidance on how each phase of the service oriented methodology should be executed in a real world project. I not only find this chapter as a first of a kind in the industry but also am startled by the way the authors have treated the subject and brought it to the reader. One can easily use some very basic and common sense to create a project plan to execute on an SOA project based on the sheer merit that this chapter brings to the table.

Each other chapter focusses on a specific discipline of how to take SOA into a real world project engagement but the topics are kept so well aligned, integrated and standalone that the reader can either focus on one single chapter and execute on it or put them all together and be the guru in your company! The chapter on 'Realization of Services' is a master art that demonstrates how you can implement the RUP-SOMA methodology using the present day products and technologies that are available in the market.

In short, I consider this book as an eye-opening treatment of the subject of SOA and it keeps itself very true to its title i.e. it provides the reader with enough arms and ammunition to go execute successfully on a real-world and practical SOA project.

Thank you authors - now I know why IBM is the best and has the greatest share in the SOA market!

Everyone who wants to understand SOA concepts and also how to put them in practice should read this book. The authors show in a clear way how to implement SOA from modeling to deploy.

Like many of the acronyms in use today, SOA is quickly becoming so broadly used that it is difficult to understand the real role of SOA, the impact on legacy platforms and the realization of true return on investment.

This book avoids focusing on the generalities and re-definitions found in most SOA books and heads straight at the heart of and challenges addressed by SOA. The book gives superb treatments of service modeling and how to maximize reuse of existing silo based services, decomposition of silos and implementation of new reusable components.

But, even more critical to the reader and SOA implementor, the book provides the best and most useful information on SOA governance that I have seen in any of the SOA books out there. Like all models oriented towards reuse, SOA models without proper governance can quickly devolve back into a silo structure negating the value of SOA. This book provides a clear path towards delivering the benefits of SOA in conjunction with implementing an evolving SOA governance model.

Anyone who wants to understand the value of SOA, the challenges of deployment and a means of delivering it while avoiding the risks of "big bang" deployment should definitely read this book.