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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great review of WS concepts, April 30, 2004
This is a great book for system architects who build complex, distributed, advanced applications using XML Web services in .NET, or would like to. While admittedly not a code-centric tutorial guide, it does serve to clarify many of the questions a developer considering the Microsoft .NET Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 would have, and demystifies many of the questions posed about interoperability between WSE versions and across platforms like .NET and J2EE.Contrary to the criticism that some have unfairly labeled the book with, I didn't find the material to be rehashed MSDN articles that would be otherwise easily accessible on that site. Rather, author Jeannine Hall Gailey gives an academic overview of the areas for WSE 2.0 under development by those architecting the web service model on a macro level (BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, etc.). Instead of regurgitated programming articles, Jeannine (whose body of work in writing about WSE and the high-end use of SOAP in .NET environments is most impressive) presents a complimentary collection of easy-to-follow articles on advanced uses for extending SOAP's capabilities, using a writing voice that's welcome and friendly. (You'll surely appreciate this latter benefit, as the material can get quite complex at times.) So rather than give you code to nail down a specific problem, an overview of the web services model and of next-gen apps relying on SOAP is examined. And you'll more well-rounded and better off because of it. When used in combination with the code found on her articles at MSDN, they make for a very effective guide to helping you build powerful systems. At 232 pages, the book is a great quick read, giving the reader a high-level understanding of many of the concepts being discusses and/or enforced by the web services powers-that-be. The major WS-* considerations such as attachments, security, reliable messaging, coordination and policy enforcement are described. The book is written beautifully and organized logically, with easy to understand hypothetical scenarios. The book makes mention of SOAP 1.2, and while it admits to leaning towards the SOAP 1.1 spec for the moment, does take the time to mention the differences between the two. There's also a very healthy amount of information for two technologies you're likely to have lots of questions about - encryption and DIME attachments. There was a terse mention of working with SOAP messages across SMTP, and I would have liked to see more of a discussion on this topic. There's lots of good information about other transport protocols like HTTP, TCP and UDP, but sadly, not much on SMTP for building secure messaging systems over e-mail. But I can't pin this minor shortcoming directly on the author - the Web is currently sorely lacking such information outside the scope of mentioning that SOAP can transport across SMTP. But aside from that, this book is a great read for those looking to take SOAP to the next level and really leverage the WSE in their applications.
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by Juval Lowy
