Customer Reviews

Understanding SOA with Web Services

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There are a variety of architectural works out on SOA. This is another architectural book in this crowded field. There is reasonably in-depth coverage of the role of each of the web services standards. Though I find the tone of this particular book a bit more accessible than the others. The author is plain spoken and pragmatic.

There is some code in the book, in C# and C++. Though this is certainly not the focus of the book. Which is a straightforward walkthrough from web service standard basics, through integration, security and into transactions. It's a fairly short book, with each chapter at around 30-40 pages and the whole book weighing in at 400 pages.

You will most likely have to buy other books and check other web resources to get in-depth coverage for your language of choice after taking the tour that is this book.

While it's pretty easy to understand the basic concept of web services, it's a bit harder to put it into the full Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework. Eric Newcomer and Greg Lomow do a good job of sorting things out in the book Understanding SOA with Web Services (Addison-Wesley).

Chapter List: Introduction to SOA with Web Services; Overview of Service-Oriented Architecture; SOA and Web Services; SOA and Web Services for Integration; SOA and Multi-Channel Access; SOA and Business Process Management; Metadata Management; Web Services Security; Advanced Messaging; Transaction Processing; Bibliography; Index

Now, what this book *isn't* is a detailed reference manual on web services and how they work. There are plenty of other reference sources for that. This book is more along the lines of a very good architectural treatment of web services, something that would be appropriate for a technology architect in an organization. The material shows not only what web services are, but how to build an environment of applications that are based on calling those services to get things done. If you follow their advice closely, you'll find that application development can start to resemble a Lego-type structure. You build applications by stringing together existing business processes that are encapsulated as web services. They also cover many of the up and coming web services standards that are slowly winding their way through committee, such as WS-Trust, WS-Federation, and a multitude of other similarly named standards. By the time you get done, you should have a pretty thorough understanding of the strong and weak points of web services, and how best to implement them in your environment.

If web services are important to your organization (and they probably should be), this is a good book to read...

This book is worth buying even if you stop reading it after the first few chapters. These provide not only technical advice but, even more useful, guides and templates for getting started with SOA: fine grained, coarse grained, consumer has to know details of the service he's calling, J2EE, .NET, LAMP, CORBA, whatever. All are covered at a level which makes sense in the concept of Service-oriented Architecture and design.

If you're into the nitty gritty of SOA and Web Services, then the book is also a must as it provides the reader with a wonderful insight into how, from the high level of SOA one gets down to the actual XML on the wire.

I have taken to "stealing" bits from the book --suitably attributed and with the permission of the authors, of course!-- as I have not found anything near as good and am unable to come up with something as complete and overarching myself.

My congratulations to the authors on an absolutely great book!

Firstly this book is an excellent compliment to Eric's other book: Understanding Web Services. Definitely worth reading that one as well (it doesn't really make a difference which order).

This book is a great introduction to the differences between SOA and Web Services. Too many other books tie these two concepts together as though SOA didn't exist before Web Services. SOA had been around for a long time prior to Web Services, which is simply one way of doing SOA. In this book you don't really get into the meat of Web services until page 100, which is the way it should be: the authors lay the groundwork for a concrete realisation of SOA by going into detail about what SOA is, how it's important and how to plan for it within an organisation.

I found the book a very easy read, which is important for this subject: the architectural principles behind this stuff aren't rocket science, but too often other texts dive straight into specifications/standards and blind you with Three Letter Acornyms. The authors of this book build up the book in a way which flows naturally and each chapter delivers on technical and business-oriented rationals.

Summary: if you're looking for a good text on what SOA is, what it means to you as an architect or as a business, and how Web Services may fit into that picture, then don't hesitate to get this book.

This is one of the main books I recommend to clients on SOA and Web Services. Several parts of the book that stand out from what I have seen in the rest of the field including the section on Advanced Messaging and Transactions. The work is particularly strong in the "why are we here and how did we get here" with regard to web service evolving from various technologies like MQ, Tx systems, and mainframes, and describes where Web services has advantages and disadvantages over those technologies in a non-religious format. In Chapter 3, for example, MQ, CORBA, and XML web Services are compared across a set of criteria including: service contracts, data management, registration and discovery, security, interaction patterns, communication, and QoS. These objective analyses are some of the most valuable resources in the book, because when looking at Web Services' integration it helps the architect see where the strengthes and weaknesses lie.

The only nit is section on security is good by normal programming books standards, but more emphasis on the gaps in the standards would be useful, for example input validation, and security exceptions which are a fact of life in distributed security, but are not dealt with by standards are not covered.

This book describes what gaps SOA/Web Services address and why, where the technology is going, and what you can do about it today. Very valuable.

The book is written in the well-known candid style of Eric Newcomer. It is a clear and readable overview of the current state of the art in SOA and web services, which is a subject that is essential in furthering the investments in B2B couplings and in outsourcing. It positions in the context of SOA the different constituent elements in the alphabet soup of abbreviations and the myriad of standard setting bodies involved. Without discrediting the current book, I also would look forward to a newer version when this technology has evolved further in some three or four years."

Reading this book left me overwhelmed with the acronymic promiscuity resplendent in this field. The authors describe SOA in conjunction with XML, Web Services and a whole slew of Web Services subsets, like WS-Transactions, WS-Trust, WSDL and WS-BPEL. At some point, this jargon acts as a conceptual barrier to newcomers. The book strives to overcome this, and does a creditable job. But it still can be confusing.

Perhaps the key note is how the book's subject differs from other topics, like Web Services or BPM. Much detail is given about this. There is one simplifying point. Do you come from a Java or C# background? If so, then you are familiar with interfaces. And how if you are coding a large project, good practice is to have major classes implement interfaces. So that one class does not call another directly, but instead uses an instantiation of an interface. This leads to a more modular and robust design. By analogy, this carries over well into SOA, in the context of Web Services. Of course, you should be aware of the limitations of pushing the analogy too far. As the book shows, SOA is for distributed systems. Which is more complicated that running one Java program on one computer. Still, you can migrate a design attitude.

But once you realise the analogy, a lot of the book's complexity can be pushed to a lower level of detail.

The authors explain the principles and benefits of a SOA and how web services help realize these. The writing style is clear and lucid - even some of the more technical concepts are easy to grasp. I especially liked the chapters in Part II - Extended Web Service Specifications, since there is very little out there (not counting the specs themselves) that not only explain the essence of these standards but also give a practical perspective.

All in all a great book!
Nick

This book is really good at distilling the web services standards down to the core essentials - what are the most important things to know and more importantly, where the specifications still have room for improvement. So if you would prefer to save yourself a lot of time wading through specs in order to be able to hold your own in front of the whiteboard (or keyboard) there is no better book than this. What I like most about Eric's books is they are always written in a very honest and straightforward manner and they are obviously informed by years of real world experience - in other words basically the opposite of a David Linthicum book.

I'm back here to purchase my 6th copy of this book, and 7th of Newcomer's earlier book ("Understanding Web Services"), as they are becoming compulsory reading in my division of a large and highly influential Financial Services technology player.

Newcomer and Lomow have done an outstanding job of putting a pragmatic, business and user-focused face on a field that is often either over-hyped, or too focused on technology for technology's sake. That is not to say that they only address the business-heads in this book (far from it - Newcomer in particular has been deeply involved in Web services technology and standards development since the very beginning, and this depth of knowledge of the technology is evident throughout), it is just that their discussion of the technology, even at its most abstract is easy to follow and well grounded in real-world benefits.

Rarely will you find a technical book written in such an approachable tone. Even more rarely will it cover the technology with the breadth and depth that these two industry luminaries demonstrate.

I have been working on the cutting edge of Web services and Mobile Web services for about five years, but was pleasantly surprised to find many new and refreshing insights and invaluable examples based on the real-world experience of the authors.

Perhaps the real value of this book, though, is demonstrated by my recent experience - When I show a copy to a senior manager they come back a few days later and ask me to get more copies. When I show a copy to a technical colleague, I have to fight to get it back!

Buy this book.