Customer Reviews

Web Services: Building Blocks for Distributed Systems (With CD-ROM)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

GLUE, Graham's brainchild, is the number one web services
API for Java.

Many people can talk about web services, but only some
can create what is needed from the ground up.

Several other have tried, like Apache, or IBM, but they
don't even come close to his clarity of vision and the
ease of use that comes from this.

Heed his words.

Graham Glass obviously has a talent for making complex material simple and easy to digest. This is evident in both the web services toolkit his company has released, called GLUE, and in this book, which provides a comprehensive, very hands-on, easy-to-read, look at web services.

This book covers a wide range of material, from the basics of what web services are and how they fit in the evolutionary path of distributed computing, to advanced topics such as WSDL and UDDI, Java to XML schema mapping, interoperability, and so on. Glass keeps the reader engaged in a hands-on way with a lot of example source code througout the book. The book utilizes the Java-based GLUE toolkit, which is provided on a bundled CD-ROM, to power most of the examples that illustrate the concepts. There is also a chapter on building and consuming web services with .NET and with Weblogic, a J2EE app server.

To bring it all together, there is a chapter that uses a B2B purchasing scenario to illustrate how J2EE(Weblogic), .NET, and GLUE can work together. This chapter is nice because it really gives the reader a sense of how web services really enable cross-platform interoperability, while sticking to a very pragmatic, real-world situation.

Finally, Glass provides an interesting, thought-provoking look at the P2P world and its intersection with the world of web services.

Glass' writing style is entertaining and his personal voice certainly comes through quite clearly. Overall, a very nice balance between educating the user on abstract concepts and keeping the reader busy with examples. Highly recommended.

Graham is a master when it comes to OO technologies and Graham can convey these technologies clearly. This book covers may aspect of developing the next generation architecture and provides the framework in which to design them. An outstanding book for those who want the 'meat' behind these services. I've read ALL of the books around Web Services (including the .NET) and this is my 'reference' towards building these new technologies...

This book is a perfect introduction. It's that simple. Graham Glass, by the way, runs TME a company that is about to build a next-generation computing environment called GAIA which is a peer-to-peer system. Take a peek at themindelectric.com.

Another bad book on Web Services. I bought this book as well as Professional XML Web Services, and both are terrible. If you are a developer, then this book doesn't even go into any detail about how Web Services work.
It gives you examples using GLUE which is useless and will fade into complete and utter obscurity. Of course, GLUE is completely incompatible with all the other real SOAP implementations, so if you get this book, you will need to go out and search for a better book, like I'm going to have to right now.