Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback)) [Paperback]

Judith Hurwitz (Author), Robin Bloor (Author), Carol Baroudi (Author), Marcia Kaufman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0470054352 | ISBN-13: 978-0470054352 | Edition: 1

• 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

Editorial Reviews

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

About the Author

Judith Hurwitz has been a leader in the technology research and strategy consulting fields for more than 20 years. In 1992, she founded the industryleading research and consulting organization, Hurwitz Group. Currently, she is the President of Hurwitz & Associates, a research and consulting firm with a portfolio of service offerings focused on identifying customer benefit and best practices for buyers and sellers of information technology in the United States and Europe.
Judith has held senior positions at John Hancock and Apollo Computer and is a frequent keynote speaker at industry events. She earned BS and MS degrees from Boston University and was honored by Boston University’s College of Arts & Sciences, when it named her a distinguished alumnus in 2005. She is also a recipient of the 2005 Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council award.

Robin Bloor was born in Liverpool, England, in the 1950s, a little too late to become a member of The Beatles and, in any event, completely bereft of musical talent. In his late teens he went to Nottingham University, where he acquired a degree in mathematics, a love for computers, and a number of severe hangovers.
After toiling in the English IT trenches for a number of years, Robin, following in the steps of the Pilgrim Fathers, emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Texas. In 2003, for reasons beyond his comprehension, he was awarded an honorary PhD in Computer Science by Wolverhampton University in the United Kingdom, in recognition of “Services to the IT Industry.” In 2004, he became a partner in the noted IT analyst company, Hurwitz & Associates.

Carol Baroudi makes technical concepts understandable to ordinary human beings. She’s the primary instigator and eager co-conspirator with Judith, Robin, and Marcia on their first For Dummies venture. Clocking more than 30 years in the computer industry, she’s been writing For Dummies books since 1993. (You might be familiar with The Internet For Dummies in one of its ten editions.) In 1999, she became a software industry analyst under the tutelage of Judith Hurwitz.

Marcia Kaufman is a founding partner of Hurwitz & Associates. With 20 years of experience in business strategy, industry research, and analytics, her primary research focus is on the business and technology benefit of emerging technologies. Understanding the world of business data has been one of her top priorities for many years, and today that includes data quality, business analytics, and information management.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (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
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #585,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 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
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback)) (Paperback)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Book but Not for Dummies!, May 6, 2008

By 

Eric Marcus - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback)) (Paperback)

I like this book because it is easy to read and it explains basic SOA concepts. This book will help you understand the major concepts but it is not a book that can get you started building services, SOA infrastructure and middleware.

And it is obviously not for dummies!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good starting point, February 1, 2009

By 

Leo McAguirre "Leo" (Mexico City Mx) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyles Paperback)) (Paperback)

If you are not an IT guy and for a long time you have been thinking that SOA is only related to IT, then this book is a good starting point to understand, and make others understand, that SOA has everything to do with business.

Using simple examples, this book will guide you through the different elements of SOA and will help you to understant it's potential.