Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design

This book is superb. I have read every SOA book available (up until Apr/06) because it's part of my job as a technology research analyst and all-around techno-geek. From those that I have read and studied, this is the only one I feel compelled to write a review about. AND - because I did have to go through it in such detail I'm going to raid my research notes and share with you a detailed review of not just the book, but each of its chapters. Chapter 1 - Introduction Nothing special here, this is just a chapter that introduces the rest of the book. Call it a glorified table of contents if you will. At first I felt like skipping it altogether, but then I did what I'm supposed to do for my job and that is read each and every part. In the end, I'm glad I took the time for two reasons: By reading a summary of each of the chapters I got a good feel for what this book was going to cover and what it wasn't going to cover. Secondly, I liked the author's intro stuff about ideal and not so ideal (real) SOA. Kind of insightful and stinging at the same time. Still, though, this is still just a description of other chapters. It's also a chapter you can get for free at the book's web site. Chapter 2 - Case Studies Here the author provides background information for the two companies he uses as case studies. If you're into case studies, then you'll definitely want to read through this. But - I found the subsequent samples pretty easy to follow and I think you could get away with skipping this chapter if you really wanted to. Chapter 3 - Introducing SOA Here's where I started getting into the meat of the book. If you think you don't understand what soa is or what the industry's made of it or turned it into then you need to read this chapter. It breaks it all down and builds it all up again in a very systematic manner. Make sure you leave this chapter with an understanding of how primitive and contemporary variations of soa are different because the author uses these terms later. Chapter4 - The Evolution of SOA Finally someone who makes a distinction between specification and standard and gets it right. This chapter talks about the soa industry and how vendors are responsible for soa but are also causing problems at the same time. How standards organizations are working for soa but also competing at the same time. Pretty interesting stuff and even though this was the least technical chapter, not once was I bored. It ends by comparing Ssoa with older architectures. I especially like how the author differentiates between soa and "traditional" distributed architecture that uses web services. (hint: rpc has a lot to do with it) Chapter 5 - Web services and primitive soa I read the author's first soa book last year and this chapter seemed to repeat a few sections from that. But if I remember correctly it goes into more detail and provides case study examples that the first book didn't have. If you're a web services veteran you can probably skip this one. Cha

Very good book on SOA.. I also have to comment on one of the other reviews... by Jack Herrington. He faults the book for not covering AJAX. I would be quite surprised to see coverage of AJAX in a book on SOA. Perhaps Jack doesn't understand what SOA is? Also, he faults the book for little coverage of RSS/REST/XML-RPC. These protocols are all used in consumer web services, but SOAP is certainly the hands-down winner when it comes to Enterprise SOA. I think this book clearly has an Enterprise leaning to it, and thus its coverage of technologies is very appropriate.

Finally got through this book (it's a biggie). I think many who give this text just a look-over will miss the importance of its depth. The important thing to realize is that this book doesn't just talk about SOA, IT ACTUALLY SHOWS YOU how to build it. This is important because you actually get real world advice and approaches for the analysis and design of services - two of the hardest parts of building SOA apps. The first half teaches you all of the background stuff you need to know to get you to a point where you can apply thru a series of structured processes (in the second half of the book). There are already eight copies of this guide floating around my company and we have used many parts of it (although some required customization). If you don't know or understand SOA then this book will get you up to speed. If you think you know SOA I recommend it anyway because its clarity and - most importantly - its pure definition of SOA (not clouded with vendor jargon) establishes an extremely important target model that allows you to create service-oriented apps without tie-down to any particular proprietary platform. You often hear how this or that book is a "must read". If you are interested in SOA then this one truly is.

Thomas Erl has done it again. This follow-up to his Field Guide is at the same time a companion volume and an extension to that work, taking the reader in new directions (service oriented analysis and design) and extensions of familiar ones (WS-* specifications). In a service oriented enterprise, getting buy-in and beginning an analysis is critical to success. Erl uses easy-to-understand case studies to describe how to decompose business problems into manageable pieces and shows how to build the pieces up into a service-oriented backbone. To extend the work established in the Field Guide, Erl provides practical usages of the WS-* extensions, including code snippets and examples that go beyond any previous work on the subject. The text of this book is very easy to read, but still very detailed and techical, communicating years of practical experience in terse and accessible prose. This is a book for the true enterprise architect, but can (and should) be read and understood by anyone from technology management and software development.

I have not in my long career in IT encountered anything quite as complex and confusing as what is being called service-oriented architecture or service-oriented computing. It's still distributed the way technology architectures have been for several years now. It still seems to use the same kind of technologies that internet apps have been using for the past half decade. So what exactly is a *service-oriented* system? And, more importantly, what makes it better? I looked to this book to answer these and many more questions and to address a great deal of skepticism I had regarding this whole SOA trend. Erl's book provided me with an education in SOA and everything that surrounds it. The book systematically breaks down content into an intelligent sequence of sections and chapters that gradually and smoothly transition through basic to intermediate to advanced topics. It's a superbly written tutorial that blends coverage of technologies and theory with case studies and code examples. I honestly couldn't remember the last time I read such an organized and informative book. I think this book will be important because SOA is becoming the next big thing (yes, I am a believer now) and because there is nothing out there even close to providing this level of insight and guidance. A classic in the making and highly recommended.