Customer Reviews

Web Services Platform Architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-Reliable Messaging, and More

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

 

 

As an architectural book this is a fine work. It's short, somewhat terse but not overly so. Graphics are consistently well used throughout. And the author has a genuine grasp of the subject.

If you are looking for an architectural level work, or a high level introduction to web services, then you may have found your book. But if you are looking for something that presents both the architecture and some examples of implementation you won't find what you are looking for here.

What do you get when you put a number of Web Services gurus from IBM in a room for a while? You'll get the "Web Services Platform Architecture" book. In short, all the authors that assisted in writing this book are Web services experts from IBM who have either wrote the specs or assisted in writing the Web services specs in question. The nice thing about the book is that is it an easy read. It is not a dry, boring, "reading-these-specs is-putting-my-to-sleep," book. As you know, there are a number of specs that cover Web services, so the authors have a taken a short-and-sweet approach to each protocol. Each protocol is covered in detail, but the detail surrounds why you would want to care about this protocol, and not what paragraph 4, subparagraph 8 of chapter 2 of WS-Security says about naming conventions, for example. Each chapter ties the business needs to the technical aspects of the protocol, and talks about how the protocol can be used to solve a given business problem.

The following protocols are covered in this text:
Messaging-type protocols such as WS-Addressing
Description-type protocols such as WS-Policy, and WSDL
Protocols that are used for QoS specification such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Atomic Transaction and WS-Business Activity
Security type protocols (WS-Security) and other related protocols such as WS-Trust, WS-Privacy, WS-Federation and WS-Authorization
Workflow and composition type protocols such as WS-BPEL.

As the authors move "up" the stack (the protocols are presented and classified very similar to what I described above - layers atop of the transport protocols such as TCP/HTTP), the business examples get more and more involved and complicated. You need to realize that there is not much code writing actually occurs in this book, but a high-level architectural methodology of how different pieces of the Wed services stack fit together, and compliment each other. The different examples given demonstrate another very crucial fact: an architect can pick and choose the protocol and standard s/he wants to get the job done. Web services protocols are by no means an all-or-nothing concept. This is why interoperability of various protocols very important, and the main reason why some of these protocols are stuck at the "final" stages of approval committee for such a long time.

Two case studies are presented at the end of the text that covers the end-to-end model of the protocols. Authors also discuss a number of competing protocols that have come out of various Web services standard committees, and why each one is needed. Future trends in Web services is the last topic discussed in the text with a brief talk of Web semantics.

All and all, this is a great book on Web service protocols - the topics are easy to read and follow - something that each and everyone one of us involved with Web services can use given the number of protocols and standards that are out there.

Web services has grown beyond just the basics, and there are a number of new standards emerging. To keep up from an architectural standpoint, a good choice might be Web Services Platform Architecture by Sanjiva Weerawarana, Francisco Curbera, Frank Leymann, Tony Storey, and Donald F. Ferguson (Prentice Hall PTR).

Chapter List:
Part 1 - Introduction: Service-Oriented Architectures; Background; Web Services: A Realization of SOA
Part 2 - Messaging Framework: SOAP; Web Services Addressing
Part 3 - Describing Metadata: Web Services Description Language (WSDL); Web Services Policy
Part 4 - Discovering Metadata: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI); Web Services Metadata Exchange
Part 5 - Reliable Interaction: Reliable Messaging; Transactions
Part 6 - Security: Security; Advanced Security
Part 7 - Service Composition: Modeling Business Processes: BPEL
Part 8 - Case Studies: Car Parts Supply Chain; Ordering Service Packs
Part 9 - Conclusion: Futures; Conclusion; References; Index

It used to be you only needed to know a few basic things about web services, like WSDL, SOAP, and maybe UDDI. But now there's a whole new slew of standards and acronyms for web services, usually starting with WS- (WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, and so forth). The first step you need to take is to figure out what the new standards are and how they fit into the overall picture. The authors do a good job of this in the book. They present an architectural diagram that shows the whole SOA stack of where each piece fits. Then they have each "part" of the book cover the current and new web services standards that fit in that area. For instance, when you read the section on discovering metadata, you'll get the explanation of both UDDI (the common current standard) as well as coverage on WS-MetadataExchange, which is where things are going. That combination of current and future standards makes for a strong understanding of the technology as well as the opportunity to compare and contrast quite easily.

This isn't a book I'd recommend to someone who wants an in-depth understanding of any single standard that's covered. The information is just detailed enough to give a system architect the skills they need to design an application using the technologies, but not enough to answer all the "how do you glue this to that" questions a coder would ask. But I'd still recommend it to the coder and the architect so that they'd learn what it is they don't know, and learn how to frame all the details in their further studies.

Good material, and one of the more current and up-to-date titles out there...

This book is all about Web services platform architecture and standards. It cooks well on most of the alphabet soup of web services standards. This book would guide you instead of browsing over the internet for what is what. The book falls short on guidelines for implementing them. The book also a bit old in its evolving specifications and endorsed standards coverage particularly less about WS-I and WS-Security* standards. That is disappointing.

Web Services have been rapidly evolving. This entire field is in a state of flux as many companies, including IBM, Amazon, eBay and Microsoft, search it for a killer app. The book and the field groan under the weight of a slew of acronyms - SOA, WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, WS-Security, BPEL and more. Unfortunately, there is little that you can do about this but pay attention.

The key idea in the book is of Service Oriented Architecture. It gives us a loosely coupled system; made of nodes that asynchronously communicate using message oriented protocols. A non-blocking mode that greatly improves the robustness of the entire system. The book goes into all this and far more.

A major merit of the book is that it is very up to date. Including an explanation of Business Purpose Execution Language. This is the latest big innovation in Web Services. It grew out of the realisation that Web Services Description Language was not expressive enough to describe intricate business logic across different interacting Web Services, even in a declarative format. So BPEL was devised to handle this shortfall. Essentially, any other book on Web Services that omits mention of BPEL is now obsolete.

This is a great reference book for the Web Services Stack and all the new specification and how they all fit in. Good starter when looking for a solution, but you will need other references for implementation.

This book is specially interesting by its chapter of introduction to the BPEL, since it is a subject that does not treat in almost any book of technical form.

It is a very interesting book so that it introduces to the reader in all the concepts and technologies involved in the Web Services focusing it towards a services oriented architecture.

It does not get to be a complete book on SOA, tries it either, but it provides good bases.

What makes very interesting to the book is that each concept and architecture introduce it very correctly and later makes one more an approach more technical, with examples of code, or definitions.

Everything and not to be a complete guide if who provides a very ample vision and detailed enough, so that the reader concretely knows that he is being spoken at every moment and he knows by where must extend its knowledge.

He lays the way to the knowledge of the technologies implied in the Web Services.

A very special chapter is of the BPEL where aside from introducing conceptually it gives it a good technical introduction providing to the reader the technical foundations to know the BPEL and power to confront a following deeper learning of the matter of more comfortable form.

It provides the necessary keys and concepts, as well as a general vision, allowing a later learning of the matters that interest easily but.

It is a book that nowadays is updated with the technologies that treatment.

Recommended for a very good conceptual and technical introduction to the Web Services, of form independently and like tool of SOA.

There are several other books, that are over 2 years old that do the same job as this book. As an SOA enthusiast, you probably own or have read several of them already .. why bother with another one?