Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies, 2nd Edition [Paperback]

Judith Hurwitz (Author), Robin Bloor (Author), Marcia Kaufman (Author), Fern Halper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0470376848 | ISBN-13: 978-0470376843 | Edition: 2nd

Feeling overwhelmed by the buzz about SOA—service oriented architecture? Take heart! Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, 2nd Edition makes it easy to understand, plan, and implement the latest SOA solutions for your business.

Whether you’re the IT person responsible for developing SOA or the executive who’s trying to get a handle on the concept, Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, 2nd Edition will help you understand what SOA is, why it’s important, and how you can make the most of it. You’ll find out about the business and financial aspects of SOA, how to decide if you need it, and what it can mean to your bottom line. Discover how to:

• Identify the main components of SOA and how they work to create business processes
• Create reusable, flexible systems and avoid common pitfalls
• Deconstruct business processes and applications to identify their components, then put them together in new ways
• Construct SOA business applications for maximum adaptability
• Confirm quality in a situation that’s difficult to test, and assure the quality and consistency of your data
• Develop a governance strategy for SOA based on your company’s philosophy and culture
• Work with XML and understand how it’s used in SOA
• Maximize the benefits of unified communications
• Understand software ecosystems, rich interfaces, and the development lifecycle

Packed with real-life case studies illustrating how SOA has been applied in a variety of industries, Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, 2nd Edition demystifies one of today’s hottest business tools.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Understand why SOA is important for business innovation and change

Feeling overwhelmed by the buzz about service oriented architecture? Take heart! This bestselling guide makes it easy to understand what SOA is, why it's important, and how your business can benefit. You'll discover how to create reusable, flexible systems; how IT and management team up to make SOA work; and what SOA means to your bottom line.

• What it is — see how SOA is designed for maximum adaptability

• Building blocks — examine the main components of SOA and how they work

• Break it to fix it — learn to deconstruct business processes and applications to identify their components, then put them together in new ways

• The "X" factor — explore XML and how it's used in SOA

• Who's the governor? — develop a governance strategy for SOA based on your company's business rules and requirements

• Keep it clean — find out how to assure data quality and consistency

• Everything in balance — understand SOA in context with Web 2.0, unified communications, and cloud computing

Open the book and find:

• An easy test to determine whether you need SOA

• Four common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Lessons learned from successful IT executives

• The significance of using a registry and repository

• How to leverage existing assets

• Why identity management software matters for SOA

• The benefits of SOA service management

• The ROI of SOA from real-world experiences

About the Author

Judith Hurwitz (President & CEO), Robin Bloor (Partner & Senior Consultant), Marcia Kaufman (Partner & COO), and Fern Halper (Partner & Senior Data Management Strategist) are executives at Hurwitz & Associates, strategy consultants specializing in data and service management and service oriented architecture. The team works with industry leaders on strategy and planning.

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 2nd edition (January 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470376848
• ISBN-13: 978-0470376843
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #387,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

This is the Bio I sent in for the SOA book. Despite the tongue-in-cheek tone, it's accurate.

Robin Bloor was born in Liverpool, England in the 1950s, a little too late to become member of The Beatles and, in any event, completely bereft of musical talent. In his late teens he went to Nottingham University, whose alumni include D H Lawrence and a vast array of prominent chemists. At Nottingham, he pursued neither literature nor chemistry. Instead, he acquired a degree in Mathematics, a love for computers and a number of severe hangovers.
Discovering, after a brief spell with an Insurance company, that he was never meant to be an actuary, he inflicted himself on the IT industry. He built commercial business applications for insurance companies and banks. Escaping from one role into another, he became in turn, a programmer, an analyst, a support technician, a project manager and a consultant. Eventually, for want of something better to do, he set up his own computer consultancy.
In the late 1980s, inspired by D H Lawrence, but covering quite different subject matter, he began writing articles for DEC User magazine in the UK and subsequently for DBMS magazine in the US. The consultancy that he had created, Bloor Research, gradually morphed into an IT analyst company and he started to spend more time writing about technology than making it work.
In April 1999 he published his first book, The Electronic B@zaar, which was about the dot com revolution. Much to his surprise it was a UK business best seller and was published a year later in the US, just as the dot com boom turned to bust. It received several accolades, being referred to as "a classic" by Publisher's Weekly in the US, but the market for such books had tanked.
Following in the steps of the Pilgrim Fathers, Robin emigrated to the US in 2002, but finding New England to be frostier than he had imagined, he settled in Texas. In 2003, for reasons beyond his comprehension, he was awarded an honorary Ph D in Computer Science, by Wolverhampton University in the UK in recognition of 'Services to the IT Industry'. In 2004 he became a partner in the noted IT analyst company, Hurwitz & Associates. In 2006, against his better judgment, he agreed to write a 'dummies' book with some of his partners in Hurwitz. Had that not been the case, you would not be reading these words.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a programming tome -- just a necessary one, April 11, 2009

By 

Richard Soley "Richard Soley" (Needham, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

I've always hated the "for Dummies" series -- while I never doubted its application to me (at least in some areas), I didn't think I should display my stupidity nakedly with a long line of yellow book spines! That said, the real difficulty with the series naming convention is it doesn't allow one to level-set purchases. Are the (IT-focused) Dummies books for technical novices, learning how to program? Are they for management, trying to understand the industry's latest fashion? It's unlikely you can address both segments with a single title, and having sat in both seats I can understand the confusion.

If you're looking for how to write programs that output SOAP headers, this book is emphatically not for you. This so-called "low-SOA" point of view, in which "service oriented architecture" means only "addressing services with URL's to applications running behind web servers" is well-served by plenty of other books, and in any event isn't particularly interesting. Middleware is middleware, and while there are certainly differences in quality, performance, stability, reliability and integrity of various middleware architectures from XDR to CORBA, from DCOM to SOAP, they all perform the basic functions of finding, calling, and getting results from network-addressed applications or services. Enough said.

What's more interesting in a real SOA world -- what Gartner calls "high-SOA" -- is not how one builds services, but how one structures business processes given the capability to distribute infrastructure (and other) services. That's the focus of this book, and in fact the focus of the SOA Consortium [...] Assuming you can capture, precisely define, store, reuse and optimize business processes (some of which are automated, and some of which aren't), how would you structure your business to take advantage of that "modularity of process" to better build business capabilities that support your interactions with your customers and your suppliers?

In clearly laid-out chapters, accessible by any reader, this book details only briefly the technical underpinnings; but in far more detail (and to my mind, more interesting detail) how SOA changes your company's structure. Sure, SOA is a fashion that has struck the IT industry, like many others -- but that doesn't mean it lacks value as an approach, a methodology to optimizing the business. Certainly the adoption of SOA by industry -- Gartner has called SOA "mainstream" since late 2008 -- comes from more than simple fashion. It comes from a proven methodology for improving the bottom line, using IT automation where appropriate. Most importantly, the clear case studies in this book of SOA success in real companies make it an invaluable reference. Nothing clarifies a complex topic more than clearly-explicated case studies, and those alone makes this book worth far more than the price.

David Linthicum said it best when he said "SOA is something you do, not something you buy." That said, it's good to have a solid, well-structured introduction to hand when you're doing it -- so this book is something you buy!

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very poor introduction to SOA, August 14, 2009

By 

David Rawle (UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

Started off very trivial but by Part II had become completely incomprehensible, introducing new terminology without explanation at every line.

Doesn't work at a business or technical level and certainly will not help any business get going with SOA.

Very poorly written book - don't waste your money.

Still searching for a book or website that actually helps someone get going on what looks like it should be a good methodology.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great resource, May 3, 2010

By 

Shannon Miller - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

The best resource for the S.O.A. professional. Cuts out all the boring jabber and gets to the point!