Customer Reviews

Web Services: Principles and Technology

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This book stands out from the vast array of contemporary SOA and Web services literature in many ways:

1) It presents business context and technical requirements for Web services design on an adequate level of detail.
2) It provides important historical insight without putting the reader to sleep.
3) It covers relevant related work such as e-business, EAI, and networking as needed, unlike most other Web services books.
4) It separates abstract concepts such as messaging from implementation technology such as JMS appropriately, but shows the connections when needed.
5) It builds up a non-trivial example that demonstrates how the various specifications fit together, many unique illustrations help to digest.
6) It has non-trivial exercises that will deepen your understanding.
7) The author's has a hype-free, vendor-neutral writing style and is very experienced in his field.

It always is a good sign if as a reader I want more... so I would also have been interested in the author's view on the ongoing WS-*/SOAP vs. REST debate, and about adoption of the presented concepts and technologies in the industry (tools and project usage); for example, UDDI does not seem to have much traction these days. Maybe something for the Website accompanying the book, which will also have additional material for students and lecturers?

As a practicing IT architect, I have helped many companies to transform their existing applications into Web services-based SOAs. As a book author, I have captured my own experience with the technology in writing. As a researcher, I now investigate many of the architecture design issues the author points out. Still, I find this book to be very educational and informative; I highly recommend it for practitioners, students, and researchers that want to understand the big picture as well as technical rationale and details behind the various concepts and technologies. Those of you that believe some WSDL-to-Java wizards or RESTful POX/HTTP calls are all that is required for successful enterprise development and integration, please do have a look as well - you will begin to appreciate that there is more to the picture!

As Web services are becoming one of the most popular technologies for a wide range of demanding IT applications, there is a growing need to get a thorough understanding of the foundations, principles, methodologies, technologies and protocols that under-pin them. This need, which is felt both by practitioners and the Computer Science students, is addressed superbly by the "Web services: principles and technology" book of Mike Papazoglou, one of the pioneers and world experts in the field.

Rarely will you find a book on Web Services that covers such an incredible broad range of inter-related topics with such authority and depth. The book is well organized, well written, broad, concise and comprehensive. It is an excellent coverage of the whole world of Web Services spanning principles, methodologies, engineering and technologies, which it all expertly laces together and explains with amazing clarity and sufficient details to allow a true and deep understanding of the subject.

The book covers such topics as:

* Distributed Computing Infrastructures, EAI systems and business-to-Business integration techniques
* Service Description and Publication
* Reliable Messaging and Event Notification
* Service-Oriented Architectures & the Enterprise Service Bus
* Web Services and Workflows
* Web Services Transactions
* Web Services Security
* Web Services Policies and Agreements
* Semantics and Web Services
* Business Protocols
* Web Services Development Life-cycle with emphasis on techniques for service analysis (including "as-is" and "to-be" analysis), design and service implementation options
* Web Services Management
* Grid and Mobile Services

This book is the definitive guide on Web services - excellent coverage on fundamentals, principles, operating guidelines combined with non-trivial case studies and examples which illustrate the design and engineering of Web services in a real-world setting. It provides a very precise, thorough and comprehensive treatment of Web services. Unlike other books, it goes beyond mere Web service standards, programming and implementation by placing emphasis on understanding of the concepts, principles, mechanisms and methodologies underpinning Web services.

I'm using this book in a Master's course at the University of Groningen and had a great response from the students, while I found my work as an instructor greatly facilitated by the clarity of the presentation and the available material (power point notes) for instructors. This said, I consider the book absolutely adequate also for self-study and for the novice who wants to explore the landscape of Web services.

To summarize, this book is an excellent and authoritative journey into the world of Web Services. It is an incredible read! Highly recommended!!

I chose this "textbook" for an independent study I'm doing on web services. I was excited to find a textbook considering most books on web services are trade books and don't get deep into the underlying concepts that make web services work. However, I was utterly disappointed after reading through the first nine chapters and decided to drop it and move on to my second text for the study, RESTful Web Services.

The author does a fair job covering in detail the underlying technologies that SOAP based web services use and the heavyweight, over-engineered suite of standards that can accompany SOAP based services (WSDL, UDDI, WS-*). I'm not pleased with how many times I felt I was reading the same thing over and over again. This happened at such a constant rate I would just skip to the next sections for fear of me wasting my time here on earth.

The book was published in 2008.....where is the talk about anything going on in the web services world besides SOAP and his buddies? The book does a horrible disservice, as the majority of the web services out there are using RESTful or REST/RPC hybrid style architectures. This book feels like it was was less of a textbook on web services and more of a detailed trade book on SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and other over-engineered standards.

Just because this was recently published doesn't mean its accurately reflecting the state of web services. Given my experience I'd just recommend consulting a few google searches and some highly recommended tradebooks about web services.

The book by Papazoglou has all the technical ingredients that anybody new to the area of Web services would need to understand the guiding principles and underlying technologies. The book is very thorough in its analysis and coverage. This is the only book that I know of that can be effectively used in teaching, research, and practice. This is not an easy task given the pervasive nature of Web services. It is a must read for all aspiring researchers in the area of Web services. It is also an excellent textbook for a course in service computing and service-oriented architectures. This book is an excellent tool for business and software architects contemplating the use of Web services as a solution for (re)engineering their IT.

I find it is an excellent book for any researchers who want to enter into the field of web service.
It provides a comprehensive coverage of the underlying concepts, principles, and methodologies of web services.
It provides numerous examples to demonstrate how web services are designed, developed, deployed and used in real world applications.

What particularly I like about this book is that it clarifies the position of the web services in the context of distributed computing, e-Business, EAI, and business processes, which is somehow missing in other books on web services.

I also find the Self-test questions, hints and tips, and discussion topics throughout the book is very helpful.
I reckon it could be a good textbook for postgraduate students.

These days it is practically impossible to find a stand alone computer or computer system. Computers are connected by networks and form distributed systems. The reasons for moving toward distributed systems are simple: users wish to communicate, share information and share resources: peripheral (printers, scanners, etc.) as well as computational. Communication supports cooperation that leads either to saving money or making greater profit. Sharing information gives people economic, political, and social power. Sharing peripheral resources saves a lot of money, in particular when the resources are unique and expensive, e.g., printers used by architects and car designers.

The role of IT within businesses and the influence of IT (in particular IT-related capabilities) on businesses are changing dramatically in the last decade. This is caused by a number of the following major factors, which are the outcomes of vendor and research institutions research and development. Firstly, the Internet has provided an excellent environment to share information and enhance communication. Secondly, commoditization and standardization of technologies allows building inexpensive and powerful computing systems using off the shelf components. Thirdly, virtualization addresses directly the heterogeneity and interoperability problem - virtualization provides starting blocks to develop a new environment which will offer an even greater range of service providers and customers at a higher level of service. Fourthly, users want to not only use the Internet to communicate and share information; they want to execute distributed application on the Internet. Fifthly, the combination of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and fast Internet makes possible for services (e.g., compute, storage, applications) to be delivered on demand to business customers.

More and more distributed applications are being built using a variety of development environments. The problem was what technology could be used to allow services to use the Internet and open Internet-based standards. The answer was Web services, a new paradigm of Web computing. These days, researchers, academics, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, software developers and IT professionals should be well prepared to face and take advantage of this new and important technology.

The book extensively covers Web services. This book is a timely and important response to the needs of different groups of readers. The book is structured such that different groups of interested readers can find the relevant study material easily and can either build their knowledge step by step, in the case of beginners, or jump into the needed material and use previous chapters as a reference. This is reflected in particular in three major parts of the book: introductory, advanced, and emerging trends.

The introductory part addresses basic concepts of services and Web services, SOA, and interoperability. These concepts are presented well from the coverage and easiness point of view. A section on the impact and shortcomings of Web services is of a great value for a beginner. Chapter 2 presents enabling infrastructure - it is a good background on middleware and interprocess communication. Those readers who already studied distributed system could omit this chapter. The following four chapters introduce and discuss XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which directly supports interoperability, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, which is not so simple anymore), WSDL (Web services Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), which are three basic standards the Web services concept is built on. These chapters are written well. Based on these chapters the reader can acquire good basic knowledge of Web services. Web services exploit asynchronous communication. This implies a need for addressing and event notification. These issues are addressed in Chapter 7. The reader can create a good picture of these very important concepts and their role in the development and work of Web services based applications. Chapter 8 introduces Service Oriented Architectures. This allows the reader to build a uniform knowledge and understanding of the principles and concepts of SOA and service-based programming, which form a platform of the development of distributed applications based on Web services.

The knowledge and understanding of the material covered in Chapters 1 - 8 allow the reader to study Web services in business. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss in a precise but well written manner more difficult concepts of service composition, in particular processes and workflows, web services orchestration and choreography, and service transactions.

The advanced material of the book is discussed in Chapters 11 - 16. Although the topics addressed in these chapters are more difficult and require some good knowledge and understanding of business, business processes, security, software engineering and system management, the material is presented clearly and well from the learning point of view. In particular, Chapter 11 provides an answer to why and how to secure Web services and Web services based applications. This study is followed in a natural way by an analysis and some synthesis of service policies and agreements. These two chapters form a good foundation platform for software developers and Web services providers. Off course, postgraduate students will benefit from the study of these two chapters enormously.

Chapters 13 and 14, which cover semantics and Web services and business protocols, respectively, are probably the most difficult chapters of the book. However, postgraduate students who carry out research in this area or those who try to start their research leading to a PhD degree in the area of Web services and Web services for business will benefit from this material a lot. These two chapters are well organized and well written.

Chapter 15 forms a good reminder of software engineering methodologies for already active software developers and good introduction for advanced undergraduate students and postgraduate students who start building distributed applications based on Web services. The former group of readers can of course omit this chapter. Chapter 16 provides good material for professionals who manage software and in particular distributed systems and applications that exploit Web services. I will not be tempted to include Chapters 15 and 16 in the advanced material of the book.

Chapter 17 presents recent trends and developments in particular grid computing and mobile computing. I do not think that grid computing is a recent trend, but it is my private assessment of the recent trends.

I would like to state in summary, as a researcher carrying out research, supervising PhD students and teaching advanced undergraduate students in the area of distributed systems and applications, I have found this book informative, clear, and well written. I enjoyed its study. I have recommended the introductory material of this book as a textbook for my advanced undergraduate students and the whole book as a compulsory reading for my postgraduate students.

Andrzej M. Goscinski, Deakin University