Customer Reviews

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Compass: Business Value, Planning, and Enterprise Roadmap

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

 

 

For a while, as a senior architect and technical director, I've been planning to position SOA - articulate it's major business benefits and formulate an adoption plan - for my company. There are a lot of interesting articles on the web but they are not providing a consolidated and coherent view at the level which I needed.

The SOA Compass provided an impressive and well developed view of the various elements in SOA adoption - ranging from business value & enterprise governance to the nitty gritty of non-functional requirements (security, management). After reading the chapters, I can appreciate the breadth of the various facets, and the associated factors and relevant issues. The book provided an enlightening experience.

I'd strongly recommend this book to anyone who's struggling to get answers to the myriad of questions around SOA ... this book lives up to its title and provides a compass to navigate the SOA labyrinth. Finally, it was pleasant to read the foreword by Vinton Cerf, the father of the internet and chief technology guru at Google.

The whole subject of SOA, or Service Oriented Architecture, is getting to be ever-more mainstream in IT organizations. Being able to build systems using a web services architecture presents some very real advantages, but how do you know where to begin? From an architecture and structure viewpoint, this book does a pretty good job... Service-Oriented Architecture Compass: Business Value, Planning, and Enterprise Roadmap by Norbert Bieberstein, Sanjay Bose, Marc Fiammante, Keith Jones, and Rawn Shah.

Contents: Introducing SOA; Explaining the Business Value of SOA; Architecture Elements; SOA Project Planning Aspects; Aspects of Analysis and Design; Enterprise Solution Assets; Determining Non-Functional Requirements; Securing the SOA Environment; Managing the SOA Environment; Case Studies in SOA Deployment; Navigating Forward; Glossary; Index

Given the right audience, this has a lot of valuable information. If you're a developer looking for information on how to code a web service, then you'll likely be highly disappointed. This book is *not* a coding tutorial, nor does it profess to be. It really serves as a guide on how an SOA environment can be built and leveraged within an organization. I would see this as being a great book for an application architect trying to position an organization's overall application strategy. For a person like that, all the important concepts are to be found here. There's the "why"... why be concerned with SOA? There's the "who"... Who in your organization plays a part in designing and building these services to be used by the business? And of course, there's a lot of "what"... What are the parts that make up an SOA implementation, and what does an organization have to take into account to make it all work together? It's easy enough to build a web service to look up a name or something, and to think you're now leveraging SOA. The reality is much deeper and more fundamental than just rolling out a web service here and there... An additional feature of the book that makes it unique is that it references online developerWorks articles on the IBM web site in order to add more information to the mix. Oh, and I probably should mention that since it's an IBM Press book, there's a heavy slant towards IBM examples and software. But overall, the core information is vendor-neutral, and it's material you'll need to understand in order to make an SOA implementation a success.

Don't think you'll sit down, read the book in a couple of hours, and then be all-knowing when it comes to SOA. The material takes time to read and understand. But once you make it all the way through, you should be well-grounded in the fundamentals behind it all.

The IBM Enterprise Integration Team experts provide a comprehensive guide to planning, using and managing Service-Oriented Architecture, helping business readers migrate to SOA by sharing best practices and lessons gained from projects and development efforts. From considering SOA's impact and importance in the business environment to SOA design, analysis, security and integration into other systems, chapters provide technical and detailed software engineering information based on models, services and activities in real world situations.

Service Oriented Architecture is one of these concepts that has come along and gripped a substantial part of the business and technical imagination. So companies like IBM are attempting to flesh out what this could mean for their customers.

From the text, it can be considered that SOA is the idea of Web Services, taken to a higher level. The book describes SOA as "a set of flexible services and processes that a business wants to expose to its customers, partners, or internally". Each of these services might well be implemented as a Web Service. SOA is more about the framework that aggregates these Web Services in a simple, modular manner.

Plus, note the word "processes". This can include activities or procedures that might not be expressed, or easily expressible if at all, as Web Services. Another dimension in which SOA differs from a Web Service.

How will SOA turn out in practice? The book's explanation is impressive, but at its level of discussion, there is a certain inevitable amount of jargon and handwaving. The lower level idea of Web Services seems now to be reasonably valid and successful. It will take more time with SOA to see what happens.

The book also has a tangential and useful feature. Each chapter ends with links to papers that IBM makes publicly available at its developerWorks website. A rich resource for you to mine. The technical calibre of those papers tends to be quite high, and they develop further the various ideas in the chapters. If this book puts you into the habit of regularly perusing developerWorks, that in itself is a good thing.

By the way, as a minor note, you can tell that SOA is still very new. See in the title of this book the dash between Service and Oriented? This is like when the Web first burst into the general scene. It was then often written as World-Wide Web. The latter notation makes sense, except that nobody writes that way anymore.

I felt the book was very vague and redundant. However' I've not read another SOA book so perhaps they are all the same. The editing and such seemed good as well. I bought this book to pass IBM exam 664. While I did pass the exam, I think all you need for this objective are the VW003/005 PDF files from IBM, not this book. THE PDFs are far shorter in length and get right to the points you need to pass the exam, without the added fluff that this book has.

Overall, decent book if you know nothing of the subject, but a bit too much padding for IBM664/669

This new book from IBM Press released in October 2005 provides valuable inputs for someone looking for an authentic source to obtain a roadmap on SOA. Having said that, the 11 chapters present only a high level view of the topics. For instance, it clarifies that SOA is Platform, Protocol and Programming language independent. These and other aspects relating to backward and forward compatibility, the Enterprise Service Bus, the On Demand Operating Environment (ODOE) are all compressed into one chapter, Chapter-3 titled "Architecture Elements". Chapter-4 presents the SOA Adoption Roadmap with a brief set of tips for success which make interesting reading. Chapter-4 also takes a look at existing roles in IS projects and redefines some of them and introduces new ones. The UDDI Designer, UDDI Administrator and the Services Governor are new roles that I found interesting. Chapter-5 deals with Analysis and Design of Service layers through abstraction and how to categorize them. Chapter-6 carries the interesting analysis and design discussion forward and states that finding the correct asset to solve the enterprise architechture problem is difficult. The chapter discusses 2 scenarios with pros and cons and consequences of each approach with diagrams that are good.

I found these 4 chapters (3-6) of the 11 the highlights of the book. I am looking forward to delving deeper into SOA architecture from other books. This book provided a good foundation for understanding SOA.

I enjoyed the book. It was well-written in clear language, presenting a concise set of principles for a successful SOA strategy.

This book was an eye-opener for me. It presents SOA as something that you grow into. It described SOA in terms of the business benefits that it leads to, namely agility and flexibility. The authors filled the book with wise advice. It opened my eyes to the path that lay ahead of me.

The authors suggest a close working relationship between business process owners and the technical staff. They claim this is a critical foundation for being able to create services which are indeed flexible and lead to business agility.

The 2 case studies at the end of the book could have included more details.

If you're looking ahead for your own SOA development efforts, definitely pick up this book as you plan projects, evaluate staffing needs, design your architecture, and consider
software purchases.

I enjoyed this book and found a lot of valuable information and insight into SOA concepts and issues.

I too was a little put off by some of the vagueness and general fuzziness, but the basic concepts of SOA (reusability, loose coupling and interoprability are things any old Unix hand immediately understands the value of. I think SOA has a strong future; properly designed SOA systems will last longer, will be easier to modify, new clients will be easier to write and so on.

As other reviewers suggested, this is probably best used as a research base for a presentation you might make justifying converting to SOA.

I read this book after reading Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices By Dirk Krafzig; Karl Banke; Dirk Slama. That is the best book on SOA in my opinion. So may be I am a little biased, but following are my comments:
1. I found it highly theoretical. It tries to explain a lot of concepts, but does not use practical examples. This is in total contrast to the book I mentioned, which keeps the information interesting and readers can relate to it easily.
2. The case studies sections seem to be done hastily and there is no practical knowledge which you can get from them. They seem to be simple applications of web services. The authors use buzzwords like hub centric architecture etc. to make them look different.
3. Authors use all available opportunities to promote IBM products.