Brilliant Practice Orientation on SOA
Josuttis managed to write an excellent book on the practical essence of the Service Oriented Architecture. He describes in precise words and with well thought examples how the new SOA paradigm will help shaping the future world of computing and he draws paths how an enterprise can gradually implement and benefit from SOA. Other than the popular but theory loaded book by Thomas Erl, Josuttis finds a way to teach the principles and pitfalls on the example of real-world experiences. Although the work is not a tutotrial, it is one of the best books out there in the markets to cover the topic. A must read for those who are more interested in "how-to" than a catch-all theory. Simply brilliant.
Good book on SOA concepts
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Yesterday I've finished reading this interesting book from Nicolai Josuttis. I've been following Josuttis' work since my C++ times (which, btw, are a few years away now - enough for letting me sleep without thinking on memory management :)) and I was pleased to see that he still has the some easy reading writing style. This is a book on concepts. Unlike his previous work (which were on a specific technology - or should I say, language), you won't find any references to specific problems you may face while trying to "realize SOA".
Instead, you'll find an objective book which presents several aspects on SOA and offers several good advices which will really help you if you want to implement SOA in your company. And he manages to do all this in just about 300 pages (which is really cool because we don't really have time for big books, right? :) ). That means that I'm giving it 8/10.
Good Insight but thin in Implementation Details
This is an excellent book to understand SOA. The Author has put in a lot of valuable architectural views on SOA best practice which would be useful for anyone who cares about design rationales. The only small complaint is the coverage on implementation details; For example, the section on WS-Security is really lack of details, not even a sample WSDL on WS-Policy. However I appreciated that code details could be left out and I think it is very effective for a book of 300 pages to cover so many key items of such a wide-spread topic, it would be very helpful if the writer can refer to some URL links so that audience can go into details by themselves. Overall I think this is a very good SOA book to read
Clear and Concise
Having experienced my first service based, distributed system beginning around the 2000 - 2001 time frame, I feel well qualified to review this book. Through the years, I've heard and read a lot of SOA fluff and contradictions. This became a huge problem for me in 2005 when I was tasked, for the first time, with the job of designing a large, service-oriented, distributed system for a national observatory.
The challenge was in explaining why all the hype the stakeholders had read about SOA didn't make it any easier to implement it and that, in actual practice, building the system would require hard work and a good understanding of distributed systems. You simply cannot buy this on a disk. In all fairness, you cannot buy this in a book, either, but what you do buy in this book is a way to explain what it is you are doing.
Management and domain experts will read this and understand that there are challenges they had not thought about when they were told how easy it is to just 'wire' together services to build business processes. Developers who are new to distributed systems and/or the SOA paradigm will begin to get a 'feel' for how it differs from other approaches to distributed system design.
If you want to really begin communicating with your stakeholders, point them to this book. I've read many books and articles on SOA and found the clear, complete, and concise approach taken in this one to be most effective.
SOA, a 30,000' view
Service-oriented architecture is more than just another IT buzzword. Most companies, large and small have heard of SOA and have either jumped on the bandwagon or have plans to do so in the near future.
SOA in Practice covers a lot of ground and provides definitions and descriptions of the complex world of SOA. Initially, the book describes the motivation to adapt a service-oriented architecture. It then proceeds into a discussion of the elements of SOA and reiterates that SOA is no silver bullet.
The author makes it clear that SOA is an ideal solution for a specific set of circumstances: "heterogeneous distributed systems with different owners." If that simple definition doesn't fit your organization, SOA may not be for you.
If you are still committed to learning about or implementing SOA after understanding what it is and what it can (and can't) do for your organization, read on! The remainder of the book present an in-depth look at all elements of service-oriented architecture.
I particularly enjoyed the chapters covering the enterprise service bus and message exchange patterns. In a nutshell, they show some of the many possibilities of how SOA can be implemented - indicating that there is no 'one right way' to do it.
Web Services (not a requirement of SOA) is discussed, as well as the management of services, model-driven service development, and advice on establishing SOA in your enterprise.
The book is light on technical details. This is obviously intentional as its core focus is not the nitty-gritty of how to make it work. It is more of a high-level, conceptual view of what SOA is all about and how it can help your enterprise solve difficult challenges when faced with integration of heterogeneous systems.
(10 reviews)
