J2ee Platform Web Services

I agree with the previous reviewer of the book - This is a classic. If I go by other reviewers' comments, I may probably buy not buy this book but I read the book at a local bookstore for almost an hour. From the writing, one can tell that the book is written from an experience author with hands on experience in web services. This book has a lot of practical insights and not about theory of web services. It also covers areas such as how to integrate with legacy applications. This book is definitely written by experienced author. This is not just a book for ordinary Java programmer but a Solution Architect.

I have bought 50+ java books and this is probably the only one that will survive the bookshelf. This book is to J2EE/Webservices what Kernigan and Ritchie is to C and Bjorn Stoustroup is to C++. Unlike the other java book Ray Lai blends the Enterprise Architect point of view with the technology. This is especially important in an organization such as the one I work for where java and webservices are new. I've cited Mr. Lai's section "Establishing a Business Case" and and the chapter "Web Services Architecture and Best Practices" in peer reviews and the subsequent white paper which I've written. There's also something in the book for the code warriors. An unexpected gem from trying the coding examples was the discovery of sun/server included with the java webservices developers kit (JWSDP). This java server from Sun is the most lightweight and administrator friendly java server that is freely available. If you're simply wrapping a java class with webservices, you're repeating this on multiple computers/platforms and you are inside the firewall this is the perfect technology choice. Unlike other application servers like jboss, weblogic and websphere, it is lightweight (doesn't hog cpu bandwidth and memory) and administrator friendly (works with other apps and quick/easy to install).

This is clearly not a how-to book for the programmer tasked with the creation of a simple web service that needs to be up within a couple days. There are no long pages of code reprints or on-liner "Hello-world". No, this book is better seen as a concentrate of experience from people involved in designing large scale enterprise class services. Reading this book is akin to peeking into their notes at the end of the project: business cases, use cases, technology overviews and systems diagrams are the type of material the author has assembled.The book covers Web Services from the perspective of Sun's architecture, tools and technologies in a vendor neutral fashion. Considering the title, this should not be a surprise for anyone. After a review of the notion of services as well as the enabling technologies (XML, UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, ebXML, Service Registries), the author describes some best practices and reference designs that were successful on some large scale projects mixing services, legacy systems and the internet. The book will particularly appeal to the managers who want to understand why web services should be on their radar screens, and the architects who will design the solutions. I particularly enjoyed the diagrams which give a very good high level view of the problems at hand, as well as list of references at the end of each section. These are usually a good addition to the book's content for people wanting to dig deeper. Altogether this is the type of book I like, where the author clearly exposes the forces and risks of each proposed solution.

The book is excellent. It provides an in-depth study of web services technologies. While reading your book, I gain a lot of knowledge in the area of web services. The book is truly an invaluable resource for the design and implementation of the technologies.