Customer Reviews

Quickstart Apache Axis2: A practical guide to creating quality web services

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

 

 

I came to this book looking for a good introduction to Axis2 - unfortunately this wasn't it.

After completing this book, I really can't tell who might actually benefit from it. The material is at too high a level for someone who is an experienced hand at web services, and is at too low a level (and confusing to boot) for someone new.

Even worse, the writing shows a lack of technical editing support that is very difficult to ignore (both in terms of grammatical/construction errors and pure repetitiveness).

There is a surprising lack of working examples, and the few diagrams that are included add very little value to the text, and seem to be afterthoughts at best.

The book provided me with a lot of very generic overviews of the classes that comprise Axis2, but very little in depth coverage of any topic - which unfortunately was what I really needed.

I struggled through most of the book, hoping for a few nuggets of information. But, I did not come away with enough to recommend this book.

This book is a lot of jibberish. It goes on and describes a lot of the web services terms that people already know, but fails to show practical Axis2 APIs or how people would use Axis2 to get things done.

A lot of the stuff in this book you can simply google for or get the answers from wikipedia. When it comes to the meat: implementing Web Services in Axis2, I can't believe the book did it in one paragraph! What the....

This book is a mistake. I do not see who can make use of it. Its title implies that it is targeted to Axis2 beginners. An Axis2 newbie won't be able to gain any practical skills of it. An Axis2 advanced user will be familiar with these concepts. The details vary from too high level to too low level. Examples are virtually missing especially up to chapter 7. Very bad value for money and time spent on it.

A much more successful paper book for Axis2 beginners is: "Developing Web Services with Apache Axis2" by Mr. Tong. Also the official site offers valuable resources.

I bought this book due to the fact that at my place of employment, we are currently using Apache Axis1 as the software of choice for a web service transport SOAP layer. It is not quite doing what we want and its very hard for allot of some of our broker services technicians to use. I was approached to study a more efficient and current web service platform. I chose this and am glad I did. I found this book very useful and informative, chocked full of good code snippets and 'YES' they do work. I recommend this book for Java shops who use web services as part of their web application.

So the Document Object Model finally ran out of steam! This is one of the interesting observations arising from the book. The Axis2 standard discarded the DOM used by Axis1 because holding an entire message structure in memory was costly. Both in terms of memory usage and in the time needed to parse an incoming ascii XML string and map it onto a message in memory. If you have been reading books on Web Services written before 2008, they often talk about the DOM, and rarely about its limitations. But in those books, take a look at the verbosity of the XML examples. Perhaps as actual Web Services were implemented, this verbosity was conserved, if not enhanced, leading to performance bottlenecks in the Axis1 version of Apache.

Indeed, this book is a promising testament to the growth of Web Services. It points out that Axis1 was more or less a proof of concept. Well Web Services are now accepted as a mainstream idea. But as it moved into the mainstream, performance optimisation emerged as a necessity.

The book delves into the specifics of Axis2. Many new changes. Though it is nice to see that some key features are unchanged, like the stateless nature. Or the non-blocking handshakes. Both needed for the modular and loosely coupled nature of Web Services.

The payoff for using Axis2 is worthwhile, for deployment of real life services.

I am new to web services, and I've read many books more complicated to understand than this one (which I actually have to sell). I found in this book that the topics were presented in a simple way. I would say this book is more oriented to someone with little experience in web services and perhaps some very basic knowledge in AXIS already. It highlights the new features in AXIS2, tries to cover a bit of SOA and SOAP fundamentals. I will keep this book, but might not the only you need to read to get started.