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Implementing SOA : Total Architecture in Practice

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Brown's book is a sign that the field of SOA is maturing. The book's heft is because it is a collection of the most significant design patterns in SOA. The early chapters give an overview of SOA and what Brown calls Total Architecture Synthesis. A wholistic view of people, processes, information and (hardware) systems.

But it may be best to treat the book from a top-down classification of patterns. Where the top level has the sections Collaboration, Communication, Data, etc. There is an abundance of patterns. Which in itself might address some of you sceptical about the entire field of SOA. Sure, it has its buzzwords and jargon. However, the set of patterns and their subgroupings might make SOA more applicable to your situation, rather than just having nice high level statements of vague generality.

Many readers might [should] already be familiar with patterns, if you come from a programming background. This will indeed help when reading the book, for several terms and concepts will be familiar. Note however a key qualitative difference between the book's patterns and those of [eg] Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series). Fowler's patterns refer to code that often all sits in one machine, or perhaps in a group of machines co-located in the same server room. So bandwidth and latency are not issues. With SOA, these often arise as vital considerations. SOA refers to spatially distributed systems; maybe over large distances.

I am a software engineer implementing SOA in our company. I think, many of the principles mentioned in this book are just theoritical. You may not see this implemented in most of the organisations. The book was a good read for information.