Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!!!

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.

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.

After more than a decade of being the focus of the industry's attention, SOA is still widely misunderstood at all levels, business and technical, and is still being successfully sold as a snake oil. This is why the publication of this book is extremely important.

Being a rare objective survey of the entire SOA landscape, the book touches on numerous dimensions of SOA and services: service classification, lifecycle, management, performance, security, and governance. In the still over-hyped SOA landscape, the author stands out with his reasoning and pragmatism, which he showed in his earlier books (e.g. his excellent book "The C++ Standard Library").

On about 300 pages the author manages not just to cover numerous important topics at a reasonable depth, but to pause at important points and suggest a helpful practical advice from his own experience. The book reads well, the language is simple and straightforward. This book has a lot of thought and value per ounce, which is very unusual for a SOA book.

Whether you are new to SOA or have been sick from reading mountains of nonsense about it for years, you MUST have this book on your bookshelf, next to "Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" by Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, and Dirk Slama, and "Service Orient or Be Doomed" by ZapThink founders Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer.

Service-oriented architecture is more than just another IT buzzword. Most companies, large and small have heard of SOA and have either jumped on the bandwagon or have plans to do so in the near future.

SOA in Practice covers a lot of ground and provides definitions and descriptions of the complex world of SOA. Initially, the book describes the motivation to adapt a service-oriented architecture. It then proceeds into a discussion of the elements of SOA and reiterates that SOA is no silver bullet.

The author makes it clear that SOA is an ideal solution for a specific set of circumstances: "heterogeneous distributed systems with different owners." If that simple definition doesn't fit your organization, SOA may not be for you.

If you are still committed to learning about or implementing SOA after understanding what it is and what it can (and can't) do for your organization, read on! The remainder of the book present an in-depth look at all elements of service-oriented architecture.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters covering the enterprise service bus and message exchange patterns. In a nutshell, they show some of the many possibilities of how SOA can be implemented - indicating that there is no 'one right way' to do it.

Web Services (not a requirement of SOA) is discussed, as well as the management of services, model-driven service development, and advice on establishing SOA in your enterprise.

The book is light on technical details. This is obviously intentional as its core focus is not the nitty-gritty of how to make it work. It is more of a high-level, conceptual view of what SOA is all about and how it can help your enterprise solve difficult challenges when faced with integration of heterogeneous systems.

This book is written from a vendor neutral perspective and introduces SOA from business view and technical view as well. Statements are based on real-life experiences and real-life examples. The concepts in SOA like Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Message Exchange Patterns, Model-Driven Service Development and SOA Governance are well discussed. The book exists of 20 chapter; one chapter is about Web Services which is an indicator for "SOA is not JABOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services)". There is a well written discussion about loose coupling, mediation (which is a part of loose coupling) and SOA vs. OO. Unfortunately, there are no chapter about the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) and semantics (which becomes an important part in SOA). Finally, there are well selected references (e.g. Dirk Krafzig and Thomas Erl) and a very good overview of SOA in this book.

This is an excellent book to understand SOA. The Author has put in a lot of valuable architectural views on SOA best practice which would be useful for anyone who cares about design rationales. The only small complaint is the coverage on implementation details; For example, the section on WS-Security is really lack of details, not even a sample WSDL on WS-Policy. However I appreciated that code details could be left out and I think it is very effective for a book of 300 pages to cover so many key items of such a wide-spread topic, it would be very helpful if the writer can refer to some URL links so that audience can go into details by themselves. Overall I think this is a very good SOA book to read

I found this book a great introduction into the technical relevant issues of SOA. The book in particular helped me get a head start when I pitched my research to a CTO of a major insurance company involved over the last 5 years in SOA evolution (after much groundwork, I was given two hours of his precious time to convince him that there is value in my research for his organization, and was expected to make an in-depth case for the relevance of my work to his SOA evolution effort). Because the book prepared me well, I could follow with ease all overview and detailed design discussion, and also contribute to the technical discussion, which significantly contributed to the success of the meeting. I warmly recommend the book to anyone who wants to get a head start into technical but also organizational aspects of SOA in organizations.

Josuttis does an excellent job in transferring his vast experience with SOA architecture to the reader in ways that allow you to take your previous knowledge of enterprise software and (finally) understand SOA to the point where you can guide a team as to whats important and not important and where the pitfalls are.

There are some initial chapters that have some confusing points specifically around what an ESB is or is not and whether its needed in a SOA. To cut a long story short, Josuttis is being initially abstract about what an ESB is which is confusing when we have very specific examples in the marketplace. When he says you need an ESB to implement a SOA I was confused until he explained that you need specific functionality that you might implement in an application server (as many have successfully) or buy an EAI product or buy an ESB. After that it was plain sailing in terms of understanding what to think about architecturally.

This book is far more practical and accessible than the Thomas Erl books and articles that I've read which left me wanting less abstraction and more specifics. In addition he also covers the soft skills side (not just the technical side) which is critical when making stategic changes to IT systems.

To reiterate, clearly a lot of painful experience has been distilled here and you would be crazy not to read this book to get that injection of experience in your team.

This is a book that will build your confidence as an architect faced with SOA tasks.

El libro repasa los principales elementos que uno se encuentra a la hora de afrontar un proyecto SOA. Lo hace desde una perspectiva práctica y pragmática. No intenta defender la arquitectura, sino explica cuando es útil y cuando no. Cuando lo es, qué elementos se han de tener en cuenta, que decisiones hay que tomar y como hay que estructurarse. En definitiva una puerta de entrada para lecturas más avanzadas. Lo mejor la independencia en el enfoque.