Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) (Paperback)

by Judith Hurwitz (Author), Robin Bloor (Author), Carol Baroudi (Author), Marcia Kaufman (Author)
Key Phrases: siloed applications, enterprise service bus, plumbing layer, Delaware Electric, Helvetia Patria, Oracle Fusion Middleware (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

• SOA is the most important initiative facing IT today and is difficult to grasp; this book demystifies the complex topic of SOA and makes it accessible to all those people who hear the term but aren't really sure what it means
• This team of well-respected authors explains that SOA is a collection of applications that enables resources to be available to other participants in a network using any service-based technology
• Examines how SOA enables faster and cheaper application development and how it offers reusable code that can be used across various applications
• Covers what SOA is, why it matters, how it can impact businesses, and how to take steps to implement SOA in a corporate environment

From the Back Cover
Get up to speed on what SOA is and how to use it

Make your business more adaptable and responsive to change

Today's businesses seem to change at the speed of light, and software support structures simply have to keep up. And that's exactly what SOA is all about! Here's the scoop on creating applications and services that can be organized for reuse, easily maintained and supported, designed to produce consistent results, and shared across an enterprise.

Discover how to

• Respond more quickly to market changes
• Allow your IT staff to be more flexible
• Improve business agility
• Navigate ins and outs of SOA architecture
• Enable interaction with new business partners

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies (November 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470054352
• ISBN-13: 978-0470054352
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #255,769 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A broad introduction to SOA, December 30, 2006

By	Clifford Anderson (Cranbury, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The authors of "Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies" are partners of Hurwitz & Associates, an information technology consulting firm. They provide a high-level overview of service oriented architecture (SOA). SOA breaks with traditional practices of software development, which frequently led to the creation of many redundant "siloed" data stores and applications across the enterprise, by promoting the development of reusable services that can be strung together in different ways to achieve multiple ends.

A key thesis of "Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies" is that successful transition to a service oriented architecture (SOA) requires the cooperation of business managers and I.T. people. SOA is not simply the latest and greatest approach to building distributed systems; SOA also re-conceives how business and I.T. should work in partnership to construct their software architecture. The authors warn that simply asking developers to design a set of reusable services may not result in the creation of the right sort of services. Developers need instead to work in close cooperation with businesspeople to make sure that the services being developed serve useful business purposes. This is sage advice that evidently comes from long experience consulting on I.T. projects.

That SOA is still a developing design philosophy becomes evident as the authors discuss some of its more advanced dimensions. The authors make a good case, for example, that as SOA evolves it will become necessary to guarantee certain levels of service and it will also be necessary to implement SOA supervisors to monitor the overall quality of service. However, they caution that most enterprises have not made it far enough along the road to worry about such things. It's also interesting to note that while they recommend setting up formal repositories and registries for services (using UDDI, for example), most of the companies in their case studies section are still using excel spreadsheets, web pages, and the like. The lack of implementation gives some of the authors' best practices a slight air of speculation. However, the authors repeatedly make the point that the best way to achieve SOA is not to turn everything into a service at once, but to begin with a key service and then iteratively develop new services as the value of having such services is recognized. Enterprises may implement the more advanced aspects of SOA down the line as the number of services grow and the complexity of their interaction increases.

The chief drawback to "Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies" is its aim to speak simultaneously to developers and businesspeople. The authors were almost apologetic for including a section titled "Nitty-Gritty SOA," which covered XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc. They clearly did not want to put off their business readers by introducing too much technical jargon. However, this unwillingness to get into too much technical detail proved frustrating at times because some key topics lacked any detailed technical exposition. For example, the authors emphasize again and again the importance of having an enterprise service bus (ESB) but failed to provide a satisfying explanation of how precisely an ESB works to orchestrate services at a technical level. I also could have done without the quick listings of various vendors' offerings in SOA in Part V, although the accompanying case studies were valuable. I imagine that the majority of this book's readers will be software architects who will appreciate having this kind of high-level overview to use as a touchstone for discussion both with developers and business managers.

"Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies" successfully makes the case that transition to a SOA will generally result in lower development costs, fewer redundancies across the enterprise, faster response times to market changes, and the development of more creative kinds of business services. It may provide just the kind of reassurance that many I.T. and business folk need to get started with SOA at their own companies.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Confused and Overwhelmed by SOA? If So This Book is For You, December 28, 2006

By	Mary Feltman (Indianapolis, IN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I work in an industry where I need to understand new technologies and trends and the potential impact these new technologies will have even though I am not highly technical. I found Part 1 of SOA For Dummies invaluable in helping me understand what SOA actually is. I had searched high and low (unsuccessfully) for a definition that made sense, that could boil SOA down and SOA For Dummies does just that - provides an easy to understand presentation of SOA. Typically I would have put the book down at this point and continued on my way, but I skimmed further sections and decided to read them. After reading Parts 4 and 5, I was able to understand that SOA is not some kind of newswire word of the day, but a concept that real companies are using to make offerings more usable - if a company has existing software SOA can be used for example to help integrate new software with existing software. Who knew case studies could actually be interesting? I'm trying to understand not implement SOA so I skimmed Parts 2 and 3 but even being non-technical I gleaned some golden nuggets of information from those parts which are targeted at those embarking on the SOA journey. The authors clearly know their stuff, and somehow have managed to take a complicated, sometimes fuzzy concept and make it understandable. It's rare to find a book that can serve a myriad of readers, but the authors have done it here. Whether you need to understand SOA to sound educated during cocktail conversations, or you've just been tasked with implementing a SOA solution, you will find an invaluable resource in this book.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm no dummy, but this is good!, September 9, 2007

By	David C. Hay "Dave" (Houston, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have always been seriously put off by the "Dummies" series. I would like to buy books that assume some intelligence on the part of the reader. I don't like being talked down to.

But this book doesn't do that. Instead it explains concepts clearly, and has been a great help to me in understanding the clouds of jargon that surround this topic. The explanation of the components of SOA and how they hook together is excellent!

Because I am not yet directly involved, I cannot judge the accuracy of their details (and of course, they may change over time), but since the objective is to get the main concepts across, I believe the authors are successful.

I really wish, though, that the series were called "Achieving Buzzword Compliance in ...".