SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design (Theory in Practice) [Paperback]

Nicolai M. Josuttis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0596529554 | ISBN-13: 978-0596529550 | Edition: 1

This book demonstrates service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a concrete discipline rather than a hopeful collection of cloud charts. Built upon the author's firsthand experience rolling out a SOA at a major corporation, SOA in Practice explains how SOA can simplify the creation and maintenance of large-scale applications. Whether your project involves a large set of Web Services-based components, or connects legacy applications to modern business processes, this book clarifies how -- and whether -- SOA fits your needs.

SOA has been a vision for years. This book brings it down to earth by describing the real-world problems of implementing and running a SOA in practice. After defining SOA's many facets, examining typical use patterns, and exploring how loose coupling helps build stronger applications, SOA in Practice presents a framework to help you determine when to take advantage of SOA. In this book you will:

• Focus squarely on real deployment and technology, not just standards maps
• Examine business problems to determine which ones fit a SOA approach before plastering a SOA solution on top of them
• Find clear paths for building solutions without getting trapped in the mire of changing web services details
• Gain the experience of a systems analyst intimately involved with SOA

"The principles and experiences described in this book played an important role in making SOA at T-Mobile a success story, with more than 10 million service calls per day."

--Dr. Steffen Roehn, Member of the Executive Committee T-Mobile International (CIO)

"Nicolai Josuttis has produced something that is rare in the over-hyped world of SOA; a thoughtful work with deep insights based on hands-on experiences. This book is a significant milestone in promoting practical disciplines for all SOA practitioners."

--John Schmidt, Chairman, Integration Consortium

"The book belongs in the hands of every CIO, IT Director and IT planning manager."

--Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group; Executive Director, SOA Consortium

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nicolai Josuttis wrote "The C++ Standard Library" and "C++ Templates" for Addison-Wesley. An experienced systems architect, he recently spent two years rolling out an SOA at a major mobile phone company. Nicolai is presenting tutorials on SOAs at a number of conferences, and has been speaking on the subject for over a year so far.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596529554
• ISBN-13: 978-0596529550
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #283,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A hitchhiker's guide to SOA October 24, 2007

By joshSVUG

Format:Paperback

I found the book to be well written and the content draws on Mrs. Josuttis daily experience as a system architect.

As a developer, I found value in the second half of the book (chapters 10-20) as the discussion revolves around specific aspects of running SOA, in particular Message Exchange Patterns (ch. 10) , Versioning (ch. 12) and Model-Driven Service Development (ch. 18).

I have to agree with one of the quotes on the back-cover, "The book belongs in the hands of every CIO, IT Director and IT planning manager." --Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group; Executive Director, SOA Consortium

The optimal audience for this book is most likely IT Management and not the rank-and-file developers of the SOA world.

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Writer, But Average Content November 28, 2007

By Joku

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book starts very well and you become very excited about what the future chapters will hold. I must say that the writer is an excellent writer and knows how to captivate you, but that only lasts as long as what he's talking about entertains. The chapters that a few here seemed to have liked were the best parts of the book, but even they were average at best. I was a little dissapointed that he gave examples of complex objects being returned from service calls, but never addressed methods that used XML instead of complex objects and in turn majority of the versioning section was based on versioning and problems that occur when dealing with complex objects. I did like the opinions he gave on using web services as means of realizing SOA. For those who didn't read the book, he doesn't think much of web services because of the many different standards organizations and the many versions of standards that are used to implement web services - these issues create interoperability problems when you're ultimately looking for high interoperability with SOA.

Overall, this book maybe of interest to a business person or IT manager trying to understand what SOA is, but it's not that great for technologists looking for implementations that may fit their system. Three Stars!!!

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Clear and Concise March 31, 2008

By Sonya Janette Lowry

Format:Paperback

Having experienced my first service based, distributed system beginning around the 2000 - 2001 time frame, I feel well qualified to review this book. Through the years, I've heard and read a lot of SOA fluff and contradictions. This became a huge problem for me in 2005 when I was tasked, for the first time, with the job of designing a large, service-oriented, distributed system for a national observatory.

The challenge was in explaining why all the hype the stakeholders had read about SOA didn't make it any easier to implement it and that, in actual practice, building the system would require hard work and a good understanding of distributed systems. You simply cannot buy this on a disk. In all fairness, you cannot buy this in a book, either, but what you do buy in this book is a way to explain what it is you are doing.

Management and domain experts will read this and understand that there are challenges they had not thought about when they were told how easy it is to just 'wire' together services to build business processes. Developers who are new to distributed systems and/or the SOA paradigm will begin to get a 'feel' for how it differs from other approaches to distributed system design.

If you want to really begin communicating with your stakeholders, point them to this book. I've read many books and articles on SOA and found the clear, complete, and concise approach taken in this one to be most effective.