29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
To thin, to easy, June 28, 2003
This review is from: Web Services, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Cloud Computing (The Savvy Manager's Guides) (Paperback)
This is management style book. It talks about all of the good things about web services. Yet it makes several crucial mistakes that clearly show that the author is by no means aware of what a service oriented architecture must provide. The crucial points that lead to failures using distributed architectures in the grand scale are not discussed. The whole problem is seen totally as a management issue. It is not. It is a vital technical challenge, and web services are by no means ready to take that challenge. Problems like transactions, security, undoability, Quality of service etc are not even slightly solved today. The savvy managers should read the book, give it to a savvy software architect, and afterwards discuss very carefully. Another annoying feature is that the author sees technical people as the ones being the greatest opposition to service oriented architectures. They can be, but the real problem are business managers and departments who do not want to be service providers in the first place because it means giving up some of their power and probably loose some of their workforce.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best overview book I've seen, June 7, 2003
This review is from: Web Services, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Cloud Computing (The Savvy Manager's Guides) (Paperback)
There must be hundreds of books on Web services, most of them with chapters that read like alphabet soup (UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, etc.). I've read quite a few of these books and it's awfully easy to get lost in the details. Douglas Barry's Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, The Savvy Manager's Guide, does something else: it gives you a genuinely useful high-level view.
Barry makes a very important distinction: Web services (the term we hear about so much) are connections. Services are what these connections deliver. What is important in the long run are not the connections (Web services) but the goods they will provide (services of many kinds). As Barry and many others see it, the future of software is in the services that will be used to plug information (data) and programming into service-oriented applications.
Managing both the connections and the services will be a principal task of IT in the coming years, and it's Barry's contention that it can best be addressed by developing a service-oriented architecture. Much of the book is given over to discussing the nature of software architecture, what it means in the case of services, and how you would go about deciding what kind of architecture to use. This seems like esoteric stuff, but Barry does a very good job of removing excess jargon and inserting real-life analogies to clarify the topics.
The author also uses his own experience and point of view to humanize what could be a mind-numbing onslaught of abstractions. I'm particularly happy that he discusses the difficulties of implementing Web services and a service-oriented architecture - a reality check that's sorely missing from many other books.
Personally I might quibble with his assumption that the technical difficulties of Web services and particularly the problem of arriving at standards will shortly be resolved. But this is, ultimately, a matter of timing. That Web services are going to be important and probably pivotal for software is generally accepted. Barry does an excellent job of explaining what's involved, why it's important, and how to approach it-necessary background information for just about everybody involved in IT. Highly recommended
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just Right For Management Types, August 14, 2003
This review is from: Web Services, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Cloud Computing (The Savvy Manager's Guides) (Paperback)
Frankly, I feel that some reviewers misunderstand the purpose of this book. In my opinion, for the right person, this book is a gem! Any of us who have had the challenge of explaining new and difficult concepts to managers who left technology back in the COBOL days or never were technologists should be grateful.
As technologists, we forget just how much intimidating jargon we use and how many underlying assumptions we make when we explain things. As a software architect once said to me, "if I had more time, I'd make it simple." Clearly Barry has taken on the challenge of making it simple, and such efforts are incredibly valuable.
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