The book talks about BPEL in a way expecting that your a BPEL GURU, I brought this book to learn BPEL, not to hear how other people used it.
Rating: 1 / 5
There have been an entire bowl of alphabet soup regarding various kinds of distributed processing systems. All of them, in their time, achieved a certain level of usage. None of them has done much to change the basic way we do business communications. That may be changing.
The development of the internet from a little system to exchange technical papers to a worldwide set of sites, all speaking internet protocol, have generated the expansion of broadband services all across the world from New York City to small towns in the third world. The basic ability of an individual to seek information has subsequently been expanded with XML so that information can be exchanged between computers of different types with different operating systems easily and without having to understand the characteristics of the computer at the other end. XML is a very open standard and it has some weaknesses. Enter BPEL to establish a set of standards, some common ways of doing things, and a generally more organized approach.
BPEL servers have been developed by, and there are URLs to: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun and at least four open-source implementations.
While this is a beginners book in so far as BPEL is concerned, it is presumed that the reader has some experience with XML, web services, and some kind of web services developent system such as J2EE or .NET.
Rating: 5 / 5
A brief background on my credentials – I’m with Interway , a company that provides software products to companies to help with their SOA needs (among other things).
Author of book Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL” – Matjaz B. Juric a Kapil Pant has a lot of experiences with business processes and technologies related to service oriented architecture (SOA).
Book is not primarily assigned to IT specialists, even it describes IT implementation process too and it doesn’t go deep into technical details. The mission is to demonstrate to the business managers and analysts main characteristic of SOA, that SOA has to be “Bussines-Driven”. Such a goal of service orientation can be achieved by easy transferring the business model created by BPMN into implementation by BPEL. Showing the importance of BPMN in service computing is the focus of this book. Business processes are in center sight of book which are essential for each company.
BPMN and BPEL are ways and means to help for creating effective business processes. Book involves whole lifecycle of business process starting from analysis and design to implementation, testing and management. For each part of lifecycle there are described SOA components (BPEL, services, ESB, business rules, BAM) which help to improve business process.
Authors choose Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite (BPA) as a modeling tool to model processes using BPMN. BPA tool helps to reach optimal analysis, results and predictions of processes using simulation. Oracle BPA Suite in collaboration with other Oracle products like SOA Suite, BPEL Process Manager and BAM can easy bridge analysis of processes with their implementation.
There are few pages showing ways of process modeling using BPMN in Oracle Business Process Architect. Properties settings of BPMN components like sub-processes, events and cycles and instances are described in more detailed. Authors write in detail about settings parameters of simulation and results evaluation.
Transition from BPMN model created by business analysts to BPEL process is not possible without filling up important technical information. Thanks to good integration Oracle BPA Suite with Oracle SOA Suite we can use extensions to add this information directly into BPMN model.
Authors describe properties of most important extensions like Automated Activity (it can be invoking of partner’s services or receiving information supplied by partner’s services), Human Workflow Activity (tasks performed by humans), Notification Activity (sending messages by email, fax, telephone or SMS) a Business Rules Activity (rules).
At the end there is example to demonstrate whole life cycle of business process. Implementation BPMN model starts from his design and simulation, then it leads to deploy as BPEL and to monitor by BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). There is described possibility of synchronization changes in BPEL process with BPMN model using blueprint of process which stays in the middle between BPEL development environment (JDeveloper) and BPA.
You can’t expect instructions for solution of particular problems although there are some patterns and rules for process modeling.
Authors explain why BPMN and SOA is the best solution for business processes and straightaway describe what is it BPMN and SOA. Chapters are supplemented by adequate comprehensible screenshots and diagrams.
The result idea of this book is that “role of IT technologies should be more complex than just executing automation of business tasks, it should be Business-Driven”.
Rating: 4 / 5
I wish this book was release a few months before as it would have saved me a lot of time and effort, with its real life examples for BPEL process implementations its a great book to have for anyone who is a new or regular user of OraBPEL.
It is an excellent book for someone new to the Oracle BPEL as well as gives excellent tips/ideas to experienced users in areas of :
- Managing an Oracle BPEL Production environment
- Using BRE rules engine for rule segregation
- Building Dynamic BPEL processes
- and Enriching the workflow applications.
I would have also liked to see some usage tips for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and BPEL integration to real time application reporting through BAM.
Overall a comprehensive BPEL book with great amount of experience “cooked” into it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Book was practically new just like it was stated, and it didn’t take more than 2 weeks to come which was PERFECT! There was almost no difference between this book and the new books =]
Rating: 5 / 5
Aimed squarely at developers, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) gives you everything you need to get started developing applications that uses the AWS (everything, that is, except the developer’s token which you can generate from the link on the product page).
A good understanding of Web Services is expected of the reader. If most of the terms XML, XML/HTTP, SOAP, XSLT, XML Schema, DTD, and WSDL leave you puzzled, then you need to read up on this topic first.
Most people downloading this kit will be web developers intending to use the services on their web sites, but the AWS kit is useful for all applications, including stand-alone applications and desktop integrations (e.g. you could integrate it with Microsoft Word to complete and maintain a bibliography for your thesis).
You should have familiarity with whatever development environment you choose. The kit contains examples in Java and perl, and has sample requests and responses, both for SOAP and XML/HTTP. However, most development environments, including Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, are full supported through SOAP and WSDL.
There are also examples on how to use the XSLT service, which is probably the easiest way for many to get started with the AWS.
The kit contains documentation in Microsoft Word and HTML formats. The documentation is somewhat terse, and describes the format of the calls to the Web Services. However, it omits any detailed description of the returned data structures and values, and it misses many useful functions (for example how to add multiple items to the Amazon shopping cart).
In summary, this kit will enable you to develop both traditional applications and web sites that use the Amazon Web Services. However, the documentation is terse and has a number of omissions, and some of the examples (e.g. perl) contains broken code, so realistically you’d want to participate in the developer forum (full instructions are in the kit and on the Amazon web site). The forum is friendly and active; it contains many examples of how to use AWS in a multitude of development languages and on a wide variety of platforms, and has a user-contributed Frequently Asked Questions list.
Good effort by Amazon and I appreciate the need to get the documentation out in a reasonable time, but for the next release we hope for more complete documentation, working examples, and examples for more languages. Three stars.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book, a collection of real world BPEL patterns is a must for any budding or experienced BPEL developer. My company are a software development company specialising in SOA solutions. We have deployed a number for successful SOA projects with BPEL, running on the Oracle BPEL engine, being the cornerstone technology on these projects. This book, along with associated tutorials, has been a key factor in achieving this success – giving us a headstart for some of the key patterns you will need in any BPEL project. It has saved us many days in our R&D lab by pointing us to the code we require for standard tasks required in our BPEL process – these patterns are an excellent addition to any BPEL teams developer standards and guidelines. The book is intuitive to follow, leading the developer you through cases with workable examples that you can build and deploy in your own environment.
All of the patterns in the book form a useful library of common BPEL scenarios. The pattern related to Dynamic Partner Links gave our development team a great hand in designing BPEL projects for production – on certain projects we use this extensively to give deployment options that are not suited to a web service directory.
The chapter on maintenance and management was invaluable for our Application Administrators. It is always easy to get a Proof of Concept BPEL process working in a lab environment, it is the issues faced when rolling this out across an enterprise that cause often time consuming resolution. This chapter gives many tips and leads you to understand the dehydration store for BPEL instances – a very good start point to build up reference documentation for any Application Administrator who intends to manage BPEL in a live environment.
Chapters on Business Rules (a technology that I feel is essential within SOA and within any BPEL solution) and on Reliable Processing give excellent introduction to the topics a developer will need to understand to build production standard BPEL.
The chapters on Rich Application UI and Building BPEL proc on the fly raises interesting ideas that have certainly triggered design innovations in our team. The WSIF chapter is very useful as a reference and includes many examples of techniques for what you will need within your toolkit.
Altogether an excellent addition to any developers bookshelf, but of particular necessity to anyone intending to use Oracle SOA tools to develop applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many of our clients are migrating from traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to the standard based SOA. This book has ten real-world case studies, which helped me to architect the solutions. Sometimes I use this book as best practices of Oracle BPEL-PM .
I like this book because the approach is more real-life examples than theory. Developers with minimum experience in SOA world will be able to leverage this emerging technology very easily.
Even though this book is useful for anybody to understand SOA and BPEL, this is extra useful for the people who are using Oracle Fusion Middleware (BPEL Process Manager).
An excellent book for beginners and for those who want to get familiar with advanced BPEL features. First chapter is a little weak but chapters two and three are great. This book is also a must for everybody working with Oracle BPEL Process Manager (chapter four). The examples are great. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
The BPEL Cookbook is an excellent practical guide to real-world SOA integration issues. It is not a “Learn BPEL” book, but rather the next step once you learn how to develop in BPEL. It addresses various types of issues that one needs to consider when developing BPEL processes. Chapter 3, “Building the Service Value Chain”, addresses the core of building a SOA architecture that the business process must be standardized and documented. While a couple of chapters are Oracle BPEL centric, the rest of the chapters address generic issues of any BPEL implementation. In particular, Reliable Messaging, Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF), building dynamic BPEL processes, and centralizing logging and error handling. For those using Oracle BPEL, chapter 5 shows how to use the Worklist API to build a rich Internet application. And chapter 2 shows how to integrate PeopleSoft CRM with Oracle eBusiness Suite.
Rating: 5 / 5
Martin Kalin’s Java Web Services Up And Running example-driven book offers an introduction to Java’s APIs for XMP Web Services and RESTful Web Services alike, and is a pick for any collection appealing to Java programmers. From working code examples and clear directions for deploying and creating an application to writing web services from scratch and handling authentication, Java Web Services Up And Running is a pick for any student of Java programming.
Rating: 5 / 5
The entire book can be summed up on 3 to 4 pages. Mostly the book regurgitates the same concepts over and over to fill up the pages, using a plethora of technical terminology to abstract it’s own meaningless. For the most part the book is intended to give you an overview of verity of technologies encapsulated in SOA architecture, but from a very distant perspective.
Rating: 2 / 5
Since the topic of this book is BPEL you might be surprised to find the question “Have you heard of business process execution language, or BPEL?” more than a third of the way through it, on page 68. But there’s an explanation: the book consists of one hundred short (usually one page) essays. Each essay is self-contained; they don’t build on each other. Page 68 is just the beginning of one of these one hundred essays. Reading this book is like reading the first page of one hundred different BPEL books.
To be fair, the book isn’t totally repetitive. One of the essays (page 73) is about “broadband over power lines”, or BPL. This essay was apparently included because the letters in “BPL” are almost the same as the letters in “BPEL”. No connection was made between BPL and BPEL in the essay.
Other surprises: (a) according to page 32 WSDL is a scripting language and (b) according to page 40 the application you need to read a PDF file is Adobe Photoshop. The book’s 42 nearly blank pages (out of 152 total) contain fewer inaccuracies.
There isn’t much to learn about BPEL in this book. The only benefit I could imagine anyone gaining from it is the enjoyment of its frequent whimsical–almost poetic–misuses of the English language. (Example from page 111: “both presents one problem to developers” ["present" intended]. From page 149: “BPEL can be compared to a child who comes from a mix race” ["mixed" intended].) I read it to the end for that very reason.
I was originally going to throw the book away but I’ve decided to keep it so I can share its profound insights with my friends. Example from page 101: “To clean out the toxins that are stored in the body system, proper waste management should also be taken into consideration.” From page 104: “When history is being talked about, it always connotes a significant event that happened in the past.” Page 148: “Since spending of hard-earned money is concerned, it is really very important to weigh things out first and be intuitive as to what the end results will be.” I’m shelving it with my humor books.
I was left with a grudging admiration for the author who came up with the idea of selling this book. (The book itself does not indicate a publisher.) He was smart enough to get $20 of my money for nothing.
Rating: 1 / 5
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
Rating: 5 / 5
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!
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a good overview of SOA concepts combined with Integration viewpoint. Integration is handled within SOA. SOA is about integration. Process Oriented Architecture was a term that was introduced. POA is about using BPEL to manage business processes with existing services.
All in all, a good review of SOA issues including ESB, WS specifications, XML considerations. Good explanation of concepts plus some of the nitty gritty details as well. Good all round.
There are 6 chapters:
1.Integration Architecture, Principles and Patterns
Review of different integration technlologies and types of integration
overview of integration challenges, process is important
SOA and its associated technolgies is a valid approach to integration
2.Service and Process Oriented Architectures
POA is centered on the processes that “use” the services while SOA is about”providing” the services.
POA is the approach from the business side of things. It is about business process and main standards include BPEL, WSCI, etc.
3.Best Practices for Using XML for Integration
Review of XML with tops and issues to watch out for.
4.SOA and Web Services Approach for Integration
SOA is not web services but web services are the specification/technology of choice in the arena.
WS applies to both EAI and B2B as well as SOA.
Included some on the specification process.
5.BPEL and Process-Oriented Approach
Familiarization with BPEL and POA together.
With a sample application of BPEL towards a Billing Process
6.Service and Process Oriented Approach to Integration using Web Services
Putting it all together with the Enterprise Service Bus(ESB).
Discussion of the ESB and what it offers for Integration and SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
The “Teach Yourself” series has done little to impress me until the arrival of this book. XML-based web services are getting traction as a truly standard way of enabling the service-oriented systems architecture. An architecture where systems can be built to expose services in such a way as to make it easier to integrate enterprise systems has been built many times already, but always ending up with constraints related to programming language, operating system and hardware. This book provides a good introduction to XML-based web services components including XML schema, WSDL, UDDI, SOAP and HTML with a comparison to the past attempts including DCOM and CORBA. The code examples require some analysis but are pretty helpful once you’ve taken the time to decode the XML and the scenario examples / case studies provide an interesting context to see how XML-based web services can be applied.
Rating: 4 / 5
As an introduction for both Websphere Integration Developer and Process Server, and limited to 400 pages, generally good. I guess there’s always the links listed in each chapter (and free IBM RedBooks) online for more detail (which I found I needed to clarify some aspects – e.g. relationships).
Mainly, it becomes annoying that it doesn’t have a coherent sample app being built through the book – instead, moving between loosely related examples. Also, while there is some code available for download, it’s only final solutions for multi-chapter blocks (i.e. not start & end stages for each lab).
Perhaps staged lab code is easily fixable on the download site?
Rating: 3 / 5
Thomas Erl covers SOA perfectly. The ebb and flow of the book is excellent. He does not cover proprietary technologies, and rightfully so. However, he explains the W3 standards of XML, SOAP, Web services and many key service models. He also is aware of corporate culture and thinking realistically as you take on a SOA implementation. This book has made me a better software developer. Keep things autonomous and keep things abstract.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book introduces bpel using oracle bpel engine beyond that this book fall short of introducing the bigger picture in terms of soa. the book also needs a revision. this book also suffers too much repetition and poor editing.
Rating: 2 / 5
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!!
Rating: 5 / 5
Someone once said: “he has an intelligent bookshelf”… Well, this book is not for a booshelf. It is for reading and having practical advantage in the confusing world of SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book does a good job of covering and tying together a broad range of material with respect to the title topic. It provides a varying degree of detail in different areas, for example a light treatment of SOA in chapter 2 yet a more in-depth look at XML in chapter 3. The intended audience is noted as architects and developers so this variance may make sense but it seems inconsistent at times. Overall I thought this was a good book for anyone interested in the topic and a good reference for those who have been tasked with an integration project.
Chapters:
1.) Integration Architecture, Principals, and Patterns – covers a wide variety of concepts including types of integration including data, application, process and presentation. It also speaks to layers of integration such as communications, brokering, routing, transformation and others. The authors touch on various technologies in the integration arena, for example, database access, message oriented middleware, remote procedure calls, transaction monitors and more. The chapter finishes up with a quick overview of the integration process, various practices activities and patterns.
2.) Service and Process-Oriented Architectures for Integration – talks a great deal about the concepts and standards that make up Service and Process Oriented Architecture. It is not an in-depth tutorial on either subject but is a good reference for the standards associated with them and why they are well suited for integration.
3.) Best Practices for Using XML for Integration – is closer to a tutorial on XML than a description of the architectural rationale and implications of it with respect to SOA. Since part of the target audience is developers the level of detail in this chapter is not un-warranted. This chapter includes a comparison of JAXP API’s and shows a number of XML schema and XSL stylesheet examples. It also speaks in reasonable detail to validation, security, encryption and performance considerations with respect to XML.
4.) SOA and Web Services Approach for Integration – steps more deeply into the area of web services and again much of it is directed to developers as opposed to architects. It contains a good overview of various patterns and contains some guidelines on their usage. The chapter contains a light review of web services for B2B and EAI and then a more detailed description and examples of interoperable web services, WSDL and WS-I.
5.) BPEL and the Process-Oriented Approach for Integration – speaks in more detail about BPEL and what the authors refer to as “the process-oriented approach to SOA-based integration.”. This chapter addresses the usual suspects of choreography, orchestration and complexity in a clear fashion. It then goes into more depth on writing BPEL processes and works through a fairly complete example.
6.) Service and Process-Oriented Approach to Integration Using Web Services – gets to the heart of the notion of using SOA for integration by delving into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This chapter covers the ESB at the appropriate level of abstraction for an architect and touches on key areas such as mediation, transformations, communications, transactions and security.
Conclusion:
I enjoyed the book and felt it delivered on the topic of SOA Approach to Integration. Trying to target both architects and developers is a difficult task but readers from either area will find something useful in this book. It is not the definitive work on SOA and Integration but it does a good job of tying together a broad range of material and will be a welcome addition to anyone’s technical library.
Rating: 4 / 5
Without having any understanding of web services, I was able to run an example web service within 30 min and completely understand the inner workings. The book makes no assumptions on skill level but doesnt bore you with over explanation. The book also shows how to use other languages such as Ruby and Perl to utilize your services. Its teach from example method will provide you with helpful starting points for your own projects.
Rating: 5 / 5
The real value of this book to architects is its pragmatic presentation of enterprise integration strategies for service oriented architectures. The author detials a range of implementation scenarios, pifalls and best practises according to the IT maturity of the enterprise.
The book presents a complex topic in a sufficiently organized and clear fashion to make it suitable as a starting point for enterprise clients to understand the language, strategic opportunity and challenges of Service Oriented Architectures.
This book is a must have for architects and technology consultants involved in implementing service oriented architectues.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good book for those seeking an initial view of process and BPEL. The book covers the basics of BPEL profile 1.1, and until chapter 4 is a good resource of information. I don’t like books that binds the technology to an specific implementation, and that’s the case of the book after chapter 4, it binds examples to Oracle BPEL process servers (which I’ve already used in production and find it a poor implementation) and Microsoft Biz Talk (never used it). It would be much better if more real world examples could be provided instead of specific providers mechanisms for deploying, creating etc. This should be a readers choice, and the product manuals take care of that. I’m a great fan of the author, have read many of his books, this one had everything to be on my top shell, but, if only there was no more chapters after the 4th.
The other reviewers here have said enough, this is a great book. The writer’s narrative style is excellent, the book logically progresses from simple examples and concepts into the more complicated ideas and problems, and takes time out to talk about the pros and cons along the way. Highly recommended and I hope we’ll see more books by the author.
Rating: 5 / 5
I liked the book and would’ve given it 4 stars except that in trying to learn how to implement the concepts and examples I became frustrated. The authors did a good job with putting the chapters together and presenting the information. The book order example is intruguing but incomplete. No where is there reference or links to download samples. Trying to follow along with the choppy pieces they present is frustrating. IBM Press site is useless so…gentlemen, I must give you a mediocre rating for a technical book due to incomplete/missing examples. Shameful and sloppy!!
Rating: 3 / 5
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An excellent software book that I have read in years. It is too the point and explains all the topics nicely and has good enough examples to get you started right away.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book demonstrates how SOA has risen in just a few years to a practical means of bolting together disparate online systems. Where these might have been coded and run with different languages and operating systems and web servers. Specifically, the book is concerned with the main choices out there these days. Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft .NET. (Yes, Microsoft appears to be deprecating the “.NET” in some of its recent marketing, but for techies, that’s still how we all refer to it.) Oh, it turns out there is a 3rd alternative, as the book is careful to point out. CORBA.
There are a set of standards that make all this possible, and the text explains these. The lowest level is simply to use XML for data interchange. This gets around the alternative of binary data interchange, and all the compatibility problems therein. The latter was the realm of CORBA. But that proved brittle in many practical deployments.
Another standard is the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). This and BPEL let you construct interoperable “parts”, that can usefully interact with other programs on the net.
There is lots of practical advice. Like the fact that parsing large XML documents can be slow. So you should not use XML to communicate between tightly coupled components. Plus, the book offers numerous patterns that can simplify your design efforts. These patterns have proved successful in existing applications, and you should take advantage of them whenever possible.
Rating: 4 / 5
It’s a practical guide on defining service characteristics and design principles in multiple levels, from component implementation to application design to enterprise architecture. Very digestive material.
Rating: 5 / 5
I did learn a lot which is all that you can ask for. The book is thin – less than 300 pages, and the author writes in a good conversational style. It is a good tutorial but it probably does not make a good reference as it does not go into too much detail in some places. For example it does not explain how to create a handler when it returns a false value (how is the response created?), and a little more detail on the client side BARE style. Also, the code examples do not use logging correctly. But these are very small annoyances compared to the overall learning.
Rating: 5 / 5
To get right to the point, this book is written in a very easy to read and accessable style, with just the right diagrams and illustrations in the right places to aid in understanding.
I’ve never programmed with web services, but I need to know the terminology and basically what it’s all about. This book served me well in this capacity.
It is not a book that goes into detail as to exactly how to do programming. This book is not technology specific, but rather after spending the first half easing the reader into exactly what web services are and why they exist, shows at a high-level how they are created with several different common technology platforms.
Also, there is a chapter on real world web services so the reader can go out and see exactly what web services look like when they are deployed in the “real world”.
If you’ve never programmed a web services application before, I seriously doubt that you’ll be able to do it after reading this book, at least nothing more than a simple example application. And in that sense, the title is a bit misleading. Perhaps it should have been “Introduce yourself to web services in 24 hours.”
So, I can see how a certain type of reader might be dissapointed, but this book is exactly what I needed when I needed it.
The authors having had real world experience on how to develop SOA, have presented this book focusing more on practicality. They have worked in different websites and online companies where they specialized either in the development of SOA or working on a specific web language that also leads to the architecture.
Because of their experience with Packt Publishing and their real world experience for SOA, Packt has chosen them to write this book about SOA Integration.
Clearly this book requires deep familiarization of the components discussed in SOA. XML and Web Services are extensively discussed so that developers will understand why the mark-up language (XML) and approach (Web Services) is perfect for integration which eventually leads to SOA. For those who are beginning in SOA, this book provides explanation in great detail in the basic concepts of SOA – from the challenges until specific terms that will greatly influence in building an application using the architecture.
What is even interesting is that it provides an insight to an alternate to JavaEE and the .Net framework. If you have a vague idea of what COBRA is, then this book will enlighten you further why this application web language could help you in building an application.
Some parts of the book are great for beginners while other parts of book are intended for advanced users. If you are looking for specific instructions on how to integrate XML to SOA, then this book will help you. For beginners or for those who just wants an in depth information of SOA, then this book will also be of great assistance.
Ultimately, this is a great addition to your library as it provides the basics while introducing you to the advanced concepts and principles behind SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
J2EE Web Services is an excellent reference and tutorial for both beginning and seasoned Web services architects and developers. This book is the first to fully cover the WS-I 1.0 Web Services standards and their integration with J2EE 1.4 components. Spend time with this book, and you’ll soon master J2EE Web Services and be able to successfully use this technology to solve key business problems in your enterprise.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a response from the Publisher, Packt, in reply to the two reviews below…
The code examples in the book have been written for the Oracle BPEL Process Manager version 2.x, which has been one of the few working BPEL engines at that time (2004, former Collaxa engine). In the mean time, Oracle BPEL Process Manager has been upgraded to version 10.1.2 and code examples required some minor modifications. New code examples have been available from the publisher’s web site (www.packtpub.com). If Oracle BPEL Process manager is installed appropriately, code examples definitely work.
Please notice that the 2nd Edition of the book is about to be published in January 2006. The 2nd Edition has been improved, particularly with the introduction of SOA and BPEL, and coverage of advanced features of Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk.
This answers the complaints in the last two customer reviews, thank you.
Michael does an outstanding job of explaining to the readers how to successfully design a service oriented architecture. This book is for technical folks like architects, developers, and test leads. If you are not technical, this book is not for you. If you are technical, this is a must have. There are enough books about SOA vision. This book is the “how” for technicians. Great stuff!
Rating: 4 / 5
This book was overall pretty good. The author details Service and Process Oriented Architectures (SOA/POA) and presents a solid approach to SOA integration. The highlight of the book is Chapter 6 (which, by the way, could have titled better!) that really dives into ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).
I gave it 4 stars mainly because it kept me interested throughout AND Chapter 6 was well worth the wait. Also, the author was direct and decisive in what he was saying. I never felt while reading that he was talking over my head or down to me from some higher plateau.
Some criticisms which kept it from a perfect 5 include:
(a) Too many repeated themes. I felt at times that I was reading the same sentence and paragraph over and over. Not a major thing, but I think I read that XML is a “standard” for organizations to exchange business data more than twice!
(b) The author throws around many acronyms, some of which without expanding. At one point, he used “PO” to refer to “Purchase Order” and I really had to stop reading and thing about what on earth a PO was (duh!). There are several examples of this throughout the text making it a bit difficult to read.
(c) Related to (b), I would have liked to read more background on some of the technologies discussed. Examples include the Java technologies that the author refers to throughout. I’m not a Java developer, so I felt a little behind in some of the discussion.
(d) I think the author spent too much time on his low-level XML discussion. I realize that XML is integral to SOA but for a book designed for “architects” and “senior developers”, as the back cover suggests, it seemed too deep for “architects” to care about and too shallow for “senior developers”. It might have been better to present an XML primer and leave it at that.
(e) By reading this book, I DO NOT feel ready to build an SOA, nor do I feel qualified to jump into a team implementing SOA.
Chapter 1 was a sufficient setup for the chapters to come. It would have been good to build a better case for SOA, though. If I was on the fence about SOA, I don’t think this book would have convinced me that my organization needed to go down this path. This chapter does however provide a lot good background and helps draw the line between different integration strategies.
Chapter 2 introduces the ESB — which for me is the most interesting aspect of the SOA approach. There is also a good discussion about processes and orchestration, which was enlightening (coming from me, who has no real world SOA experience).
Chapter 3 was the lowlight. I found myself skipping ahead when the author started discussion XML schemas, namespaces, declarations, and the like. I know this stuff already and was wondering how an “architect” or “senior developer” (I’ve been called both) would treat this chapter. I concluded that they would do essentially what I did: skim it. It is too light to be a reference and too heavy to be of any practical value.
Chapter 4 was better than the previous chapter. I like history (IT Evolution, and WS Specifications) and discussions on Patterns (the author discusses integration patters, business patterns, composites, application patterns, and runtime patters). He does however loose me a bit on writing WSDL and the simple web service example. I’ve written several web services and understand the concepts so I found myself skipping ahead a bit.
Jaded by some of what I read in Chapters 3 and 4, Chapter 5 got me back in the mood. BPEL. Finally. The book had been talking about BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) on-and-off and now this chapter gave me a heavy dose. Good job.
Chapter 6 was my favorite chapter by far. ESB is an area of interest for me, and to have it explained and examined in the context of SOA was eye opening. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to read this book in the first place.
All-in-all, I learned a lot from this material. I took a few notes, which will lead to further research on my part. This book presents a good overview of some of the complexities and key points in building an SOA infrastructure/environment. Get it if that is what you’re looking for!
This book reminds me the crash courses. The book is for a quick introuductions and a helpful examples to understand. This book starts with the introduction to web services and continues with xml-rpc and an example in java. Next chapter is about SOAP and instruction is provided to install and configure Apache SOAP server. The book continues with WSDL and UDDI and examples in java. This can be the best book as an introduction to web services, but not of the one when you need to deliver some code by next month.
Rating: 5 / 5
Advanced computer libraries will find Web Service Contract Design & Visioning for SOA a fine compendium for WS design and SOA, allowing both beginners and experts insights into the SOA Strategy and process. College-level collections strong in software engineering will find it a fine survey of web service contracts that enable services to be reused and tweaked for years to come. From versioning techniques to basic XML design and message design with SOAP, this is a detailed, in-depth reference highly recommended for any college-level collection catering to software engineers.
A very good and useful book to start using IronPython. You only need to have an idea of programming (any language) before starting with this book. It will be useful for both the Python programmer or the .Net programmer.
The demo application is done following good programming practices and common patterns (something very much welcomed).
The book shows how to use the language in desktop and web aplications; Silverlight and embedding it into your c# apps. (Ex: as an scripting option for your users to extend the program).
It reads pretty fast. I didn’t find any cruft on the book, something that is not very common with technical books. Along the chapters you will find pointers to resources in the internet to deal with subjects that are not specific to the book but they are mentioned or referenced somehow.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is really lacking on much useful information. It’s mostly a high-level overview. For anyone seriously interested in web services I’d recommend getting a different book!
Rating: 1 / 5
This book provides a very thorough coverage of web service development using ASP.NET. I found the step-by-step configuration sections to be very helpful, and also found the more detailed coverage of the framework, including ASP.NET security and interop to be helpful. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5
As someone who knew ABSOLUTELY nothing about web services when I started, this book was the best of the 1/2 dozen titles I perused because it balanced high level understanding with the nitty-gritty and code examples. I found this book far most useful than titles such as ‘Web Service: A Manager’s Guide’ and ‘.Net Web Services for Dummies’.
As someone who is not particularly technical, the code segments were still very useful in understanding what is going on. Without looking at a little code, understanding web services and its components becomes too esoteric. Why would you just describe an elephant when you can also provide a picture.
As someone who was just trying to understand web services and had no interest in comparing specific vendors’ web services offerings, the chapters on commercial tools such as Apache Axis, Java, .NET, IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic, and their specific pros/cons was not terribly interesting to me. But I could see how they would be valuable to an IT Professional.
The book does not really take 24 hours. Overall, I spent 9 intense hours working through this book to developing a good grasp of the technology. I recommend the opening chapters of ‘Understanding .NET’ by Chappell as a great supplement. Chappel gives great brief high-level descriptions on the components of web services and how they came about.
As Web Services get implemented, this book can be a vital tool in planning for the deployment. The authors have a rigorous methodology to estimate the many performance issues encountered when you try to build out an actual Web Service. They discuss important ideas like content delivery networks, which cache or mirror content at different physical locations, so that the response time to a user’s query is minimised. And it also adds redundancy. Think Akamai, for instance.
A crucial aspect they explain is how to develop a cost model for a data centre facing a certain expected rate of queries coming in from the net. Practical advice on what things to cost out and how to do so, as shown in various examples.
Most books on Web Services published after this book often discuss the networking together of various services. Using WSDL or BPEL to describe these configurations. BPEL may not have even existed in 2001 when the book was published. But the book is certainly not outdated. Nothing in it is tied to a specific version of a Web Services grammar. Those other books are more about explaining the syntax. Few delve into actual deployment scaling issues that cannot be avoided if you have to go live.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve been using a lot of RESTful services these days and have been waiting for a good book that is dedicated to the topic. I recently received a copy of ‘RESTful PHP Web Services’, which does a successful job of outlining proven concepts in current web technology. If you want to learn the methods for creating and consuming RESTful services then you will find many examples in this book. From the architectural plans to well thought out code samples, the book covers a lot of ground in a relatively quick read.
The first chapter gives the reader a quick introduction to RESTful services and the most common PHP frameworks in use at the time of writing. I particularly enjoyed the section on the Zend framework due to the explanation of benefits over the other frameworks. The chapter also covers the very basics which include a detailed look at exactly what RESTful services means and what technologies are required to use and benefit from a RESTful architecture. The second chapter gives a quick run down of the various methods in use for consumption of data; these being Curl, several HTTP methods, processing data with XML, DOM, and SimpleXML. After those are covered there is a simple example of consuming services like Flickr using the previous methods. This transitions into many more examples of consuming real world services that any developer would find interesting and exciting for data mashups.
The real meat of the book starts in chapter four where we get into designing the resource utilization systems and then the resource clients in chapter five. Those topics basically go over the nuts and bolts of gathering data, manipulating it, updating it, as well as creating fresh data. We get more instruction and usage examples on the Zend framework in chapter seven where the author gives us information on the controllers, models, and view (MVC model). This would not be too useful without knowing how to debug the code that we’re using so there is, thankfully, a chapter dedicated to debugging XML building and parsing errors. A couple of short appendixes cover the author’s own WSO2 web service framework as well as REST Client Classes which should prove useful for writing your own reusable classes.
Overall this book covers the majority of topics that a new developer needs to understand in order to start developing and deploying RESTful code and web services in PHP. From frameworks to consumable service samples, and everything in between, RESTful PHP Web Services comes through in a concise and enjoyable style that will not disappoint. I highly recommend this book for developers that are new to this topic or experienced developers that need a quick refresher course.
Rating: 4 / 5
When you sign up for a Web services and/or full Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) project, you’re also committing to learn about a host of standards including XML, XML schema, XML namespaces, WSDL, WS-Policy, and WS-Addressing. It’s a sad but true fact that these are far from intuitive, and can be quite intimidating to both architects and developers. To make matters worse, ignoring or improperly implementing these technologies greatly diminishes the chance that your project will be successful.
Luckily, there’s no need to go it alone. Thomas Erl and a collection of industry experts have added to the authoritative SOA series with this helpful book aimed squarely at assisting architects and developers to effectively take advantage of these essential standards. Using clear, easy-to-understand language it explains basic, intermediate, and advanced concepts, making it suitable for readers of all levels. It also includes extensive best practices regarding the important topic of governance. Comprehensive case studies are found throughout the book, providing realistic guidance on how to properly apply the lessons learned.
Rating: 5 / 5
Although the title is new, this book is based on the authors’ 1998 book titled “Web PErformance Metrics, Models and Methods (ISBN 0136938221). This book is more than a minor rewrite – the chapters are in a different sequence, and each has been updated. None of the information that made the older book such a valuable resource was lost in the process. For example, the material on queuing theory and analysis remains, and it among the best written tutorials in print. What has changed includes:
(1) Shifting of focus from client/server and web server environments to web services, with an emphasis on performance characteristics of SOAP and UDDI. Client server issues are still covered because these issues are still germane.
(2) An emphasis on architecture and how performance and capacity fit into a larger picture. Network and server performance characteristics are examined in detail.
What hasn’t changed includes the excellent material on performance and benchmarking basics, detailed analysis techniques, and the support for this book that the authors provide on the book’s web site. I especially like the Excel spreadsheets that you can download to use in conjunction with material in nearly every chapter.
Overall, this is one more of a series of books on various aspects of performance and capacity management. I also recommend reading their companion book, “Scaling for E-Business: Technologies, Models, Performance, and Capacity Planning” (ISBN 0130863289), which covers the applications level of e-commerce systems and seamlessly complements the material in this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The thing I like best about this book is that it covers the WS-I Basic Profile. In response to one of the other reviews that complains that the book doesn’t cover JAXM or ebXML — please note that J2EE doesn’t include support for these technologies. This book provides a thorough review of all J2EE Web services technologies, and the information in the appendices goes way beyond the JWSDP tutorial.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers the .NET web service framework very well. Even though it was written in 2002 I still recommend it for its thoroughness and utility. It was very well thought out and covers the important points of interest in a level of detail that is both practical and thorough.
Rating: 5 / 5
First part of the book while describing Distributed Systems, Middleware and EAI lays strong foundation for Web Services. Second part of the book provides an extensive reporting about Web Services Architecture, related standards, service composition and BPEL. Though at the outset this book looks like serving academic purpose but it also provides the great insight of the subject to the programming community.
This book is must have which draws detailed conceptual and architectural views on Distributed Systems, EAI and Web Services.
This book is really lacking on current or useful information. It’s mostly a cursory high-level overview. For anyone seriously interested in web services I’d recommend getting a different book! 271 pages not counting the index or glossary. Barely shelf material of limited usefulness. copyright is 2002, but book was written well before that date or century.
Rating: 3 / 5
To learn how to build and use web services, you first must determine what they are and how they differ from current technologies used in the development and use of web pages. With the exception of being based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), they are only different in degree from widely used web technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASPs) and Java Server Pages (JSPs). The authors do a good job of explaining what web services are and how they differ from other technologies. They also do not fall victim to the evangelical bug, being very explicit in pointing out the disadvantages of web services as well as the advantages as a chapter is devoted to each point. Another chapter is devoted to comparing how web services differ from other technologies such as ASPs, JSPs, Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). The middle section of the book is devoted to describing the architecture of web services , the basics of XML, how web services communicate using XML and Simple Object Access Prototcol (SOAP), how web services are described using Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and how to advertise a web service using Universal Description , Discovery and Integration (UDDI). While not detailed, it is a complete introduction to all of the steps you must go through to create a complete web service that others can use. The third section is devoted to describing several tools that can be used to build web services. Commercial tools such as Apache Axis, Java, .NET, IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic are covered and the authors are to be commended in also showing how they can be built using inexpensive and free toolkits. Finally, the last section covers topics such as the interoperability of web services, how security is included in web services and what some of the future trends in web services may be. This book is an introduction to web services, so it is not possible to learn all of the specifics you need to build complex web services from it. However, if you are a beginner, there is enough information to get you started and to help you make decisions concerning whether you want to start building them.
Rating: 4 / 5
A very nice introductory book on Web services, much different from all the others on this topic. Excellent overview of the problematics of service oriented architectures on the Web and of their relationships with their EAI counterparts (corba,rpc,..).
Rating: 5 / 5
I am using this book for a graduate level class about Web Services. I like the books approach on giving you enough background about middle-ware evolution that makes it easier to understand what Web Services are trying to accomplish. Given that the actual technology (implementation details) change so much in this area the books approach makes a lot of sense. I also found explanations to be concise and clear.
Advice: if you are looking for a hands-on how-to book about XML this is not the book to pick up. Otherwise, if you are looking for a good fundamentals book that will help you paint a big picture of Web Services this book is great!
Rating: 5 / 5
I liked the book, but I’m a web developer and all of the winforms stuff turned me off. I thought Python was a great web development language? I know it is versatile, but I would have preferred web focused examples. Not a biggie, but it was a big reason why I skipped some big sections with all the win forms setup code right in the book. How helpful is that really anyway?
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is exceptionally well done! I’ve written 3 books on Web development and I’ve written a number of articles on Web Services. I’ve also done a number of presentations on the subject at users groups around the country. I thought I understood the power and future of Web services, but Barry helped me understand the service-oriented architecture and how this what I really saw the promise in. Barry did an incredible job of bringing this topic all together. I found the book tremendously inspiring too! You won’t be disappointed by the content in this book. You’ll likely come away with 100 ideas too! Great job Barry!!! I can’t wait to read your next book!!!
IronPython is the first dynamic language developed for the .Net plateform. At first, .Net didn’t support this kind of language. This is something that keeps on coming back througout the book: you have to use some additional tricks to unleash the power of .Net dynamic and static languages.
The book starts with a general introduction to IronPython. A quick review of the language itself is followed by the use of the .Net assemblies. At the end of this part, one is comfortable enough to do some small IronPython programs.
The next part is dedicated to what IronPython offers thanks to Python and to its affiliation to .Net. The authors go through standard Python (battery included) and the somewhat associated .Net assemblies (some arguments on using one or the other could have been a big plus to the explanations), depending on what must be done. Because or (or thanks to) .Net, several pages are dedicated to XML, as it is needed to simplify the description of UIs. Also several useful designed patterns are presented with the .Net approach.
The next part starts with WPF, the official graphical interface, with several ways of using it (bridge from C#, XAML, …). Then WMI (used for system administration) is handled, but from my point of view, it is the weirdest part. WMI has its own language which does not seem like C# or Python. Besides, PowerShell, presented as well as a way of doing system administration, has its own language. There is a book dedicated to PowerShell, so only the communication between IronPython and PowerShell is handled. So two additional languages in this chapter, perhaps too many (they are limited to this chapter).
IronPython is a .Net language, so it is possible to do ASP with it. A chapter deals with this approach, chapter well written but it needs to follow the associated example in your favorite IDE if you want to follow what’s happening. Web means also web services and databases, handled in one chapter. The basis of SQL tools addressed, as well as basic webservces (mainly REST). I have to say that there are some mistakes there, as SOAP is not only used with POST HTTP requests but also with GET requests (it can be seen in the official w3c specification) and also with other transport protocols than HTTP. Perhaps these are .Net implementation’s limitation, in which case it should have been mentioned. Finally Silverlight integration allows developping light clients that can interact with other langages as well as the web page.
Throughout the book, complete interaction with other .Net languages was not addressed. It is the goal of the last part to show how assemblies can be used in IronPython and how IronPython scripts can be used from .Net static languages. As I’ve said, the interaction does not go completely smoothly, there are several solutions to accomplish it. At least, the book does not only speak about the upcoming .Net 4.0 that will help this interaction.
As a conclusion, those who need a dynamic language (to script an application) can go for IronPython, th first dynamic language for the .Net framework, compatible with the langage Python 2.5, and in that case, go for this book that will help you for anything.
Rating: 4 / 5
Although an old book, this book explains very well web services. It has detailed explanations on XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
Make no mistake. The book is old and just like some other reviewers pointed out, some of the technologies have been replaced by newer ones. But once you understand how web services work, it’s easier to adapt to the newer tools.
The author also has a tendency to add ‘filler pages’. The last 50 pages are useless which is why I gave it only 4 stars.
Rating: 4 / 5
This relatively short book on implementing RESTful web services in PHP wastes no time in diving straight into the code. After a brief introduction of the primary HTTP methods and their usage with cURL, the book gives us some good examples of mashups using real world REST services. This is good because it gives the reader instant gratification with regards to using a RESTful service in PHP.
A few code samples show some frowned-upon programming practices (such as using nested if statements), but all of them serve the intended purpose of giving a practical explanation of the preceding content; also perfect for beginners to PHP. There are chapters on designing and developing RESTful servers and clients, but to be honest not enough emphasis was given on RESTful design. However, that may not have been the intent of the author; the book definitely does it’s job of teaching PHP programmers how to implement and consume REST web services. The last two chapters on using the Zend framework to do things in a more clean manner (using the Model-View-Controller design pattern) and on debugging web services is a definite bonus for the book.
If you already some idea of how your RESTful service should look like, and you don’t consider yourself to be an advanced level PHP programmer; pick this book up to get started with your implementation!
Rating: 4 / 5
After reading a couple of dissapointing web services book, I went looking for a better J2EE web services book. I was thrilled when I saw Richard Monson-Haefel had written a web services book because several years ago his wonderful EJB book got me started with EJBs. So I had high expectations for this book, and I was not dissapointed. This is the most thorough coverage of J2EE web services that I’ve read. Equally important as what is in the book, is what is not in the book. Web services is a topic that can be an endless pit of specifications and APIs that you will never use. By focusing on technologies that are endorsed by the Basic Profile for Web Services, this book helps you focus on those technologies that are currently useful and stable. I’ve found most web services books get so lost in every specification and version that they never have time to really explain the practical issues of developing web services. This book instead provides tremendous detail on the important practical issues. In addition, by focusing on the stable and interoperable aspects of web services, the book will makes it easy to see how to develop web services that will actually work and be interoperable. And most importantly, the book is clearly written, technically accurate, and easy to learn from. So I thank the author for another wonderful book and I hope he will be writing books in all the future topics I need to learn.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a little more expensive than most of the flashy Web Services books these days but it is well worth the money. Set in small font and not wasting pages on chapters like “History of XML and SOAP” this book is dense in content on the architecture of distributed systems, including Web Services. We get to learn about the issues of distributed transactions and the differences between conversations, coordination and orchestration. The text is precise but nevertheless easy to follow. One of the best books I have seen on Web Services architecture.
You can find a sample chapter on the author’s site:
I found this book to be just right. It explains the value of SOA and the basic architecture. It skirts the technical stuff, which is fine for this kind of book. I think it’s great for a manager or a consultant pitching SOA.
I give it 4 instead of 5 due to the overuse of force field analysis and the lack of a point in the later chapters. More than half of the book is extremely useful. It would get 5 if they chopped out the useless stuff and the excessive use of force field analysis.
This book and Programming Visual Basic .NET by Francesco Balena have answered virtually all of my questions about building production distributed database applications using XML Web services. If you’re interested, you can download a sample of my working code at http://www.opointe.com
Rating: 5 / 5
This book, accurate and concise, will guide you through the world of PHP RESTful services. Thanks to simple and easy to understand examples, you will learn to create a client and a RESTful server.
To illustrate that, the author is relying on the cURL and SimpleXML libraries to setup the communication.
One chapter is also dedicated to the Zend library (Zend_Rest) allowing RESTful services integration with this framework.
Icing on the Cake, the author provides at the end of the book his own source code to consume REST services.
This code, very easy to understand, works with or without the cURL library and will allow you to do some practice and apply all the good advices provided all around the book.
A book that I would recommend to PHP beginners, but also those who are yet mastering it and want to setup their own services.
Rating: 5 / 5
While I just got my print copy of Michael Foorde’s excellent book, “IronPython in Action,” I’ve been using it and referring to it for the better part of a year. There’s a back story here, so be prepared.
I’m not a computer programmer, I’m an engineer who occasionally needs to do a bit of (rather frustrated) computer tinkering. For that, I’ve long used Matlab (a product of the MathWorks company). Matlab works well for most things, but it has some rather serious technical limitations. More importantly, though, it’s tremendously (prohibitely even) expensive. In contrast, Python is free, OpenSource and solves many of Matlab’s serious problems.
So, a little more than a year ago, I did a bit of investigation and eventually decided to try IronPython. It tied into Microsoft’s .Net library, it was real python, and it worked flawlessly on Windows. There was, however, just one problem: I didn’t have the time to figure out Python programmming on my own. That’s when I found Michael’s book. And it has been a godsend.
As I said above, I’m not a computer programmer and computer programming isn’t a skill I’ve ever wanted to properly acquire. My idea of computer programming is to find someone else’s example and then poke and prod until it does something relatively close to what I need. I don’t have the attention span for most books on the subject, and I don’t have a great deal of desire (or any serious motivation) to learn better skills.
Foord’s book simultaneously addressed two very real problems: 1) my own ignorance, 2) my impatience for results. The book nicely balances the need to teach skills with the need to show results. And I was well satisfied. The included examples are excellent, and I was able to get up and running on my own projects quickly. More importantly, though, I picked up quite a few insights on how to properly write a piece of code. For both of these reasons, this book easily earns its five stars. If you are interested in Python or .Net, it is an excellent reference. Do yourself a favor and just buy the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Then the world got more complex. We started connecting the web to databases so that much bigger sites could be developed with huge amounts of data. ==Then we wanted to do eCommerce, and we needed a way to do credit card validation. So our servers talked not only to our database but connected to some other system to get data about the credit card’s validity and to deposit the money received.
There have become a huge number of web services available. To list just a few, there’s Amazon, eBay, Google, FedEx, Pay Pal, InterFAX. From a web site you can link to these sites and get information from them that you can then integrate into your own site.
With this huge number of web services that have become available, there have become a new set of problems. Which services, which interfaces work in the real world? ==In this book, Will Iverson presents his experiences with several real world, actually operating web services. He provides detailed examples of contacting several big web sites including the programming necessary to interface to them.
This book is written for the Java journeyman. To quote from Chapter 3, “You should be familiar with basic object-oriented development, know how to add libraries to your class path, understand TCP/IP and basic networking, and be familiar with basic JSP-based web application development.
I’m not. I use Cold Fusion to do my web programming. I found the descriptions in the book entirely adequate to get me started in programming what I needed. I’m glad he did the programming because that proved that the services worked. What’s important in this book is not the programming, it’s the real world experience of what’s really working right now out there in the real world.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good book for everyone to learn XML web service! It is very straightforward and easy to understand!When reading this book and following the instructions step by step, I learn a lot of concepts and understand the basic ideas of XML web service! After reading this book, you can read the advanced books about XML service! I really recommend this book to all of you!
Rating: 5 / 5
Good book but, like many a computer programming book, it has numerous errors. For example, I just struggled with the code in Chapter 2, listing 2-13, until I figured out that the variable needed to be persisted (since ASP.NET was my programming language) using ViewState. Stuff like that is irritating, and there’s numerous such mistakes. Another one, from chapter 2, is that doc.Load(Application.StartupPath…) needs to be written:
The book is a good introduction to PHP web services, cURL and DOM. It goes into details of building a web service from scratch. That is good for understanding, but I would much rather use a framework from WSO2 or Zend.
Book has a lot of examples. Though the examples have a few problems
1. Very basic sample programs for RESTful server.
2. A lot of code is printed, but with very little explanation.
3. Code explanation does not offer more than what you would get by reading the code itself. No options or pitfalls are described.
4. Printed code formatting is awful. Statements wrap around, instead of line breaks and indentation. Random words are highlighted. Bold words have no connection to the concept being explained. For example, frequently (but not always) functions have plain “return;” highlighted.
All that makes the book hard to read.
Before buying the book, check websites for WSO2, Zend, Flickr and Yahoo. They have good documentation and tutorials.
This book is written but Cutter Consortium consultant Dave Barry and is packed with practical guidance on strategies around getting management to understand where they should be headed. This book should be purchased immediately by any manager undertaking a large web services project.
Along with this book, I would also recommend the purchase of another book by the same publisher named Java Web Services Architecture for the development staff.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great work to the authors! I bought this book in june but just recently done trough it. Sure there are mistakes, but I haven’t found 1 book that doesn’t! I don’t believe it is fair to say that this makes to book grabage. I think the editor should provide a better infrastructure to make adequate reviews/corrections to these manuscripts.
In general, I think this book deserves thumbs up considering that it has been writen few months ago.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many of the practice examples do not work with Visual Studio 2008.
Much has changed since the publishing of this book. And if you are keeping up with the new technology of Microsoft this book is outdated. Published in 2002, the new paradigm is WCF.
I would like to see and own a book that explains the new WCF, with database examples to AdventureWorks, Microsofts practice database you can download and work examples.
The writers either do not understand the topics, or they want to confuse the readers intentionally. You will find their writing style extremly annoying. They use the Skatestown(??) example to mislead the readers whenever they need to explain something. I dont know how such a bad written book can make it out to the book stores. If you buy this book, it will be the biggest waste of money.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book not only presented over 80 patterns but it also tied them together with working examples of when and how to use them as well as an overall way of creating enterprise and domain inventories.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve always wanted to use Python more. Mostly I use it to write little one off scripts when I want to move a bunch of files around or parse some text. I was really excited when Manning asked to to review IronPython in Action because I wanted to dive a little deeper into Python and possibly use it in some web applications. “IronPython in Action” makes it easy to get started using IronPython right away.
The book starts out with an introduction to Python itself and continues with a general description of how IronPython can use .NET types. It starts off by showing how to build a Winforms app using IronPython. If anything exposes the cruel, unnecessary complexity of .NET, it’s got to be a Winforms app. The IronPython examples are easy to follow and it’s always fun to create and manipulate a Winforms app using the IronPython console.
Chapter 4 talks about using Design patterns in IronPython. This is a refreshing change from most language books where patterns aren’t mentioned at all. The chapter builds an IronPython application and uses the MVC pattern for the overall architecture and the command pattern for the implementation of the menu bar events.
Chapter 7 discusses agile testing and unit testing using IronPython. I almost dropped the book in amazement. Unit testing is almost never mentioned in any language book and is relegated to a niche or advanced topic. Find a book about any other .NET language that mentions unit testing that doesn’t have the word “testing” in the title. This alone sets the quality of this book far above other language books I have read. It’s not just enough, in my opinion, to discuss the syntax of the language. You have to teach the reader how to use the language in your everyday work.
The next section, section3, deals with a few core UI frameworks commonly used during .NET development, WPF, Silverlight, and ASP.NET, as well as showing how you can use IronPython to administer your system. Performing tedious tasks is my most common use of IronPython. I use it to automate moving files that fit a specific pattern out of my “downloads” directory to their proper places. It was great to learn a few new techniques for using IronPython in Powershell.
The last section talks about extending IronPython using C#, something which it sounds like should be avoided unless you just can’t achieve decent performance with the equivalent IronPython code, and using IronPython as an embedde scripting engine. Python is used a lot in game programming because it’s easy to embed. The nuts and bolts of the game engine will be written in low-level C/Assembly while the game logic and story is written in Python. I love the idea of having an embedded scripting engine in my application that will allow me to quickly extend my application at runtime. The user need to perform a new calculation on some data? Just send them an IronPython script and have them put it in a directory. It’s a great idea and the book describes exactly how to do just that.
My overall feeling about this book is that it’s a great book. The authors use the same humor and dry wit that Python is known for to great effect. Making the digestion of a very different language easier. I’m sure that as I continue to experiment with IronPython that I’ll keep this book close at hand.
I read this book – sleeping a great deal through it, or daydreaming about nothing in particular. “Whoops I just ‘read’ 20 pages!” types of experiences were frequent with this one.
This is NOT to say the book does not explain Web Services, whatever those are. It MIGHT explain what Web Services are, but we’re never really sure. It’s sort of like Microsoft’s spiel on Web Services – you know, how they are always talking about how GREAT Web Services are. Web Services are just wonderful. That is apparently all we need to know.
So, if you are looking for another book that describes in acronym-laden (not explained) detail how great Web Services are, without actually explaining WHAT they are then this book might be for you. There is a pretty picture of a peacock on the cover so that’s nice.
P.S. For those interested to know what Web Services are, I’ll save you money and tell you right away, since I just recently discovered the answer on my own: Web Services are an idea that involves everything being online, and not sitting on your desktop – that is on servers. Like files and folders for instance, software, video games, etc. – with Web Services it would all be online and you could ‘lease’ or ‘rent’ the stuff you needed when you needed it and you would get it for a certain amount of time over the net, presumably downloaded onto your computer where you would use it feverishly until your time expired and it ‘dissolved’ into zeroes and one’s. That’s my thinking on the topic, and this book won’t make you any wiser.
Rating: 1 / 5
It seems very hard reading this book (Not about the difficult of Java and Web Services, but how they are presented). I Think once You have finished to read this book You are able to do nothing. Sorry…only my opinion
Rating: 1 / 5
There is nothing of value in this book. It’s all filler. Each chapter begins with the reminder that WSDL means Web Services Description Language.
Here’s a typical sentence (page 31):
When you try to at look (sic) at the Internet, you will be amused to know for yourself (sic) how useful, how modernized, how high-tech, and how beneficial it is to the whole mankind (sic).
And that’s the high point of this book!
If you find this “information” useful, put your money down.
Rating: 1 / 5
I’ve recently readed this book while travelling to and from work, and my goal was to learn more about Web Services, and precisely those that gave XML responses, so this book was a good candidate.
The book contains what it says: all about web services in .NET. This is good, because you can always have it as a reference book whenever developing web services. It covers SOAP, HTTP POST and GET protocols, ASMX web services and WSDL-created proxy classes, UDDI and DISCO files, state management, caching, session and state management, and even asynchronous examples.
The only “bad” thing about the book that I’ve found is the “STEP BY STEP” sub-header… At least in this book it means “complete examples in every chapter”.
The book is 373 pages long (apart from the appendixes), at least one third of that being code examples. And of that 100+ pages of code, the majority is trivial basic WS code that seeing one is ok, twice maybe, but the third time you just skip to the bold part that marks the “important” code.
The authors could have avoided full samples from later chapters, instead only showing the relevant code snippets.
But anyway, as I started saying it is a recommended book to learn (or get deep into) .NET web services development.
Rating: 4 / 5
I had his Xml book for C# 2005 which was outstanding. But now with LINQ to Xml it is even better. This is THE book to get on Xml with C#. It is all you will need.
Barry gives a readable, high level explanation of Web Services and their latest incarnation – SOA. He contrasts the latter with the pre-existing EDI, which might use CORBA or DCOM. SOA is presented as much easier to make modular, without any strange binary formats. The virtues of using XML as the underlying data exchange format should be apparent to the reader.
He suggests how a company might want to redesign its data functionality so as to use an SOA approach. This can be confined entirely within the company’s machines, or perhaps to offer Web Services to outsiders.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book did it for me! I was struggling reading numerous books on how to get started developing a Java web based application. Here in this book it explains clearly in steps (snap shots) how to configure Eclipse with the various technologies. How to write basic but essential JSP , Servlets..etc and how to debug it and like wise.
Read the iterations. It was very rewarding for me by the time i completed reading and practicing the examples given. It boosted my confidence towards continuing to learn everything I need to know about building Java web based applications.
This book take a long time to arrive at any substance on Schemas and is only good for total novices to world of XML Schemas. In-fact the real schema is seen only half way through the book. It definitely is a boring read.
Rating: 1 / 5
Mr. Goldberg writes clearly and constructively. My XML knowledge before reading this book was fuzzy at best. Now, I’m an authority on the subject. Fantastic reference.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was very disappointed with this book. I was hoping for something that would go into detail of the various Web Services solutions offered by Amazon, Google, etc. Instead it is just another Java book filled with mostly code (is it a sin to use prose anymore?) and lacking in any kind of detailed discussion at all. It basically talks about very specific problems, offers some code, then moves on to another specific solution. I found it completely uninteresting.
The only person I would suggest this book for is someone who wants code to Cut and Paste without really understanding what they are doing. And good luck to them
Rating: 2 / 5
I am very impressed with the book so far (need to finish). It holds true to the previous Visual QuickStart Guides that I have read in that it has tons of examples that go along with concepts. I have read many XML books and this book covers all the major topics concisely and clearly.
Rating: 5 / 5
Though I have had some experience in Java, Eclipse, and WTP, a recent project required me to get more into depth. This book got me through the whole development process. It explained to me clean coding techniques when writing web apps in Java, how to get my web server up and running for use with WTP, to get my apps to talk to the server, debugging using different tools, and unit testing in a web environment.
This book was an invaluable addition to my collection, and is also a great reference now that I have mastered these concepts.
Rating: 5 / 5
“Perspectives on Web services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” Zimmermann O., Tomlinson M., Peuser S.; Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2003.
This voluminous text is essentially about the classic man-machine relationship model.
The reviewer became interested in this topic and monitored the slowly evolving field until 1962 when he published a paper entitled “Shaping and Controlling Human Behaviour in Man-Machine Systems”; Proceedings of The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Industrial Administration and Engineering Production Group, Vol. 177, Number 34, pp 935-950; 1963 (1 Birdcage Walk, Westminister, SW 1).
He presented the Performance System Spectrum with Man at one end and the Machine at the other. In between these two extremes he defined and illustrated a multitude of combinations including Simple Man-Machine, Complex Man-Machine, Men-Machine, Man-Machine-Man, Man-Machine-Men, and Men-Machine-Men.
By 1963, time-sharing and remote operator terminals had evolved and the computer systems were mainframe…the personal computer and the Internet, if they were envisioned at all, would have been considered purely science-fiction. In relation to the Men-Machine-Men system, he wrote: “…the total system has become so complex, with so many inputs from and outputs to human(s), that design engineers tend to move towards a fully automated system…” In the more than four decades which followed, the flood of computerized systems (and computer acronyms) increased as anyone reading this can testify. And that brings us to today…and Web Services.
We shall see that Web Services satisfies the definition and is a Men-Machine-Men system. To quickly understand what Web Services is the average reader shouldn’t start with the text under review but with an excellent article, “The Web Within the Web,” Enrique Castro-Leon, IEEE Spectrum, February 2004, pp 42-46. Examining this paper first and then delving leisurely into “Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” will have a higher payoff even for those readers who are experienced software engineers, developers, analysts, and systems architects.
Castro-Leon presents a concise thumbnail view of this emerging concept. He argues that “…dusty, musty databases filled with useful data that would be far more useful if linked with other, equally dusty databases; enormous databases that are locked up inside ancient mainframes and quaintly archaic minicomputers; lonely databases residing on specialized file servers throughout an enterprise (pronounced business); even modern databases on Web servers…(are) stuck in long-obsolete proprietary formats or accessible only through hypermodern scripting languages…” Further, “… Web services are a way programmers can make their databases available across the Web , let other programmers access them, and tie these disparate databases together into services that are novel, perhaps even wonderful…” This, of course, is the basic reasoning for improving the Machine part of the Men-Machine-Men performance system.
“…Web browsers have liberated us from the tyranny of specific hardware and the near monopoly of the Windows operating system…(because of)…the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which provides a standard for the way Web pages are downloaded from a Web site to a computer, and the generic nature of Web pages themselves…” The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) “,…was designed to encode things that will be viewed by people, rather than processed by another machine. HTML mixes formatting commands…with data because it was designed as a display language…” Castro-Leon continues: “…if Web services are to build powerful networks of collaborating databases and services, the first step is replacing HTML with something more compatible with the world of databases, something that can be understood by another computer…such a new language has been developed…a subset of HTML, called XML, for Extensible Markup Language…”
This movement to improve the Machine subsystem did not end with the invention of XML. There had to be some mechanism to move XML data rather than HTML across the Internet. This was SOAP — Simple Object Access Protocol — a generic wrapper which is an envelope recognized and accepted by Web browsers and servers. Together, XML and SOAP give Web Services interoperability.
However, another specification was needed called UDDI —Universal Discovery, Description and Integration — which, as Castro-Leon states, “…lets Web Services look for databases (by Machine) in the same way that Google lets humans look for Webpages…” But the process didn’t end with the development of UDDI. There had to be a standard which allowed the Machine to determine what is at a site once it has been identified. This standard was WSDL — Web Services Description Language. All of these protocols took years to develop….and the improvements continue to this day.
Having presented an overview of Web Services from Castro-Leon, it is now time to review the 648 page text entitled, “Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” This is in essence a “how-to” or a “cook” book, using an old world term, which goes into exquisite detail about how these software elements work inside the Machine and how to utilize them effectively and profitably. One might describe it as a “Web Services for Dummies” type of text but written at a much higher intellectual and professional level. The occasional humor is within acceptable limits and not extreme.
In the Men-Machine-Men model, the Machine is represented by all of the computer systems in the Internet world-wide and includes SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI as software and all of the hardware world-wide. The Men at one side are all the humans dealing with the Internet as users while the Men on the other side of the Machine are all the software people feeding the Machine world-wide with data and graphics which are then manipulated inside the Machine by SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. You can visualize that the users might have a population of millions and possibly billions of individuals and the software people might represent a population of millions of individuals. That is why this volume on Web Services is an important reference today as the system is being implemented — but there is a cautionary poem by the systems guy Kenneth Boulding regarding this Machine:
A system is a big black box
Of which we can’t unlock the locks,
And all we can find out about
Is what goes in and what comes out.
Perceiving input-output pairs
Related by parameters
Permits us, sometimes, to relate
An input, output, and a state.
If this relation’s good and stable,
Then to predict we may be able.
But if this fails us – heaven forbid
We’ll be compelled to force the lid!
Having forced the lid — you are now inside the Machine! The book is structured using the “goto” branching command. The authors encourage the reader to study a section and then decide to continue on or “goto” a different section. In fact, they suggest not reading from cover-to-cover at all but selecting those parts directly related to the reader’s job role.
The text is neatly divided into Perspectives chapters which follow a typical project sequence: Business, Training, Architecture, Development, Operational, Engagement, and Future. The authors state that they and their anticipated readers are “technical people” and their approach in writing was shaped in that way
Chapter 1 is The Business Perspective. In 30 pages they discusses definitions, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), B2C (Business-to- Consumer), B2B (Business-to-Business), A2A (Application-to-Application), H2A (Human-to-Application), and potential inhibitors to decision-making. The Case Study of a fictitious insurance company is introduced which will be threaded throughout the book. Some of the flowchart models are clearer than others.
Chapter 2 is The Training Perspective. A better term for this perspective would be the “technical information” found in a manual used by individuals for self-instruction to learn about the software. 123 pages are devoted to a tutorial of concepts and technologies but the reader is not expected at this point to be able to apply them.
There is an overview of WebServices concepts and detailed information on the XML markup language including namespaces and schema. Attention to given to SOAP message formats and encoding. This is followed by WSDL, the interface description, containment structure of WSDL documents, and binding-related document elements. There are descriptions of UDDI’s registry structure, identifier bag, category bag, binding template, tModel structure, linking to a UDDI registry, an API (Application Programming Interface) overview, and brief mention of WSIL (Web Service Inspection Language). There many well-designed coding sheet examples which would make sense to experienced programmers but probably not to novices.
About 86 pages are assigned to Chapter 3: The Architecture Perspective. The authors provide an introduction to Web Services architecture oulining paradigm changes, J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and defining Web Services as the software part of the Machine. WSA (Web Services Architecture) is explained with the use of stacks and a disclaimer is provided since not all of the terms are universally accepted. WSA building blocks and component walkthrough is covered. Explanations are given for WS principles, Generic vs. Generated API, design patterns, business patterns, architectural patterns (microflow, intermediary, and interceptor/pipeline) and process choreography including public-to-private process mapping. Architectural decisions are outlined along with service matchmaking. In addition, NFRs (Non-Functional Requirements), gaps and countermeasures and SOAP Section 5 encoding are discussed. Finally, XML-based, WS, and application layer security are explained. There is a useful FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section ending the chapter.
Chapter 4 is The Development Perspective. Consisting of 192 pages, this chapter has a considerable amount of meat and consequently may cause indigestion for the vegetarians among us. The authors state that a reader should have a “…solid reading comprehension of J2SE and J2EE APIs…” It is written at a fairly deep level of detail related to reader motivation and categorizes this interest as: casual, steady or junkie. There is an emphasis on “goto” branching. Most of the coding examples are also found on Springer websites.
The introduction to the development of WS in Java presents the WebSphere Studio Workbench and Eclipse.org. WebSphere SDK (WSDK), the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), and Apache SOAP 2.3 are described with some caveats regarding known flaws. This is followed by JAX-RPC and Apache Axis, definitions, an introduction to WS for J2EE and JSR 109 and the WSDK Toolkit.
At this point, starting on page 259, the first example or case in The Case Study is considered — all the prior pages having been dedicated to technical information to bring the reader up to speed. The authors refer to the example as a “sample” and it is, of course, a simulation where the case problem is run on the WS model being described so the reader can learn how to do it later in real-life. More precisely it is a training simulation testing (with some debugging) of the solution provided by the authors….the author’s terminology will be used here.
The case scenario involves several fictitious insurance companies. In terms of the Performance System Spectrum, this scenario deals with the Men-Machine-Men model with Men being Internal Users and the Machine processing risk and fraud management matters. Business logic requirements are considered and “The Great Debate” over Apache Soap or JAX-RPC occurs, followed by configuring and building the sample. To build RPC/Encoded Services for Java the bottom-up and top-down approaches are reviewed. There is a discussion of building EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) WS with Apache SOAP, and using the WS Wizard. The process of exploring and modifying generated files is described. Building EJB WS with JAX-RPC and JSR 109 follows, In addition, exploring generated server side files, updating the project build paths, modifying generated files, and testing the deployed service are briefly delineated.
The reader is encouraged to build RPC/encoded services from WSDL first creating WS from WSDL using Apache SOAP and then testing the WS client. There is also the process of creating WS from WSDL using JAX-RPC/JSR 109 and updating the WSDL document and installing the SOAP Router, and finally testing the WS. A section is devoted to programmatic access to WSDL, using the WSDL4J toolkit, testing the JWSDL application and creating JWSDL clients with JAX-RPC and JSR 109. The reader learns to use WS-Inspection to build service indices from Java and also with Apache Soap and to configure WSIL4J.. There many excellent figures illustrating this part of the simulation. At this point, the text moves ahead to the use of UDDI.
There are discussions of UDDI access from Java and browsers, using UDDI with Apache SOAP and also with JAX-RPC and JSR 109, using other Web Services bindings, creating a document/literal Service from WSDL and a document/literal Service Client. A secton is dedicated to orchestrating Web Services and use of the Process Editor. The reader learns about using attachments with SOAP, using SOAP headers and finally exporting the completed sample. While space is assigned to finding more information, there isn’t any for FAQ which could have been useful at this stage. Some System Administrators have argued that constructing the application in this chapter was the easy part. The next stage deals with implementing it in a production environment and might be viewed as more difficult.
Chapter 5 presents The Operational Perspective which the authors have truncated to 79 pages and rely on the experience of the reader to fill in some technical gaps. There are many specific references to coding samples in .zip format on Springer websites. This chapter deals with the system architecture hosting the software and we are now deep inside the Machine in the Men-Machine-Men system — and continually aware of Boulding’s admonition: “….If this relation’s good and stable, Then to predict we may be able. But if this fails us – heaven forbid, We’ll be compelled to force the lid!…”
There is a discussion of topology, standalone topology, additional components,and clustered and managed topology. Reference is made to the Access Management Subsystem, load balancing and high availability support. At this point, the Case Study simulation of a fictitious insurance company continues and for the remaining pages is interspersed with tutorial information .
There are explanations of Deploying Web Services, the WebSphere Application Server, deployment and configuring the application server. There is information on JDBC configuration, JAAS authentication and Cloudscape, and restarting and testing the installation. Next comes Deploying Services, wsadmin, ANT; working on the private UDDI Registry, including configuring and adding WSDL documents to the UDDI Registry. Descriptions are provided for testing, clustering, and node agents; working with the IBM HTTP Server, starting, testing clusters, and finally cold standby.
Attention is given to Securing the WS Implementation: security threats, countermeasures, WS-Security, and future WS-Security extensions, Securing WS with HTTPS and SSL — as the simulation continues. The chapter closes with the WS Gateway and how to configure it, deploying a WS to the Gateway, updating and client testing. Frequent mention is made of specific websites to support the simulation so the reader is not completely alone with just the text.
Chapter 6 is The Engagement Perspective of 27 pages and a typical reader would sense that the end is in sight!! This chapter reviews many technical points emphasized in the Case Study simulation and adds the following: Planning a WS Development Project, Outlining Requirements and High Level Design, Planning and Staffing, Running the Project, including testing and going live, Success Factors, Elements of Risk,lessons learned and design advice. There is a final look at the Case Study simulation.
The Future Perspective appears in Chapter 7. The authors briefly identify SOAP Version 1.2, WSDL Version 1.2, UDDI Version 3.0, and grid computing for the immediate future. The Semantic Web including RDF and OWL are mentioned and they provide mid- and long-term visions.
The chapter concludes with “Now enjoy the first project in which you apply and exploit this hot technology!”
There are rather complete coding steps, flowcharts, and screen displays in the boilerplate content of the Appendix including: Building the Case Study Policy Systems, Java to XML Mapping, and C# — and 87 References for those who desire additional background.
As Castro-Leon in summarizing his IEEE Spectrum article said: “…the semantic Web’s benefits won’t be seen for some time; Web Services are here today…it will connect almost every island of data, software, and device on the planet…” The reviewer believes that this volume which introduces Web Services is a valuable asset in the drive to improve the Men-Machine-Men system which we call the Internet.
This book just happens to be *first*. Just wait until some of the other XML Schema books that are listed as “not yet published” hit the racks. You’ll forget about this book rather quickly.
In my opinion, this book serves more as a reference and doesn’t really serve-up any good ideas or suggested practices. In addition, one of the most annoying aspects of this book is the SIZE OF THE PRINT. It’s so darned big on relatively small pages that when they referred to a figure, I would sometimes have to go backwards or forwards 2 pages. It almost reminds me of writing my college thesis… make the font bigger, spread the text further apart, move in the margins… voila 100 pages…
Rating: 2 / 5
I am a developer of web systems. I’ve owned this book for about six months now, and I’ve yet to find anything of any value in it. It kind of makes me wonder about who would find this material useful. Overweight college professors in gray cardigan sweaters, smoking pipes maybe?
Rating: 1 / 5
This is an excellent book for people wanting to learn SOA Suite 11g.
The composite application created during the tutorial is non-trivial and includes Web Services, BPEL, Business Rules, JMS, Database Adapters, BAM, Error Handling, Eventing, Unit Testing and more.
The book provides everything you need to learn SOA Suite 11g, clearly written and at a nice pace.
You must have a very good understanding of XML, WSDL, SOAP, AND UDDI and html code. The book explains everything from the point of view of a programmer/developer.
Rating: 1 / 5
This weekend I had the opportunity to read RESTful PHP, by Samisa Abeysinghe, published by Packt Publishing. The book is short, about 200 pages, but full of great information about what REST is, how it is used, how it is supposed to be used and how to use it with PHP.
The book assumes you have a working knowledge of PHP, and how to install extensions (or use existing ones). The concepts are clear and concise. Samisa is direct, but explains the reasons for why code is the way it is, or explains what can be done different.
The books runs through many examples using Yahoo! and Amazon APIs. Most of the book could be called a manual for use of CURL and SimpleXML, as well as some DOM work. Although you will not need to know any of those things before picking up this book.
In a short seven chapters Samisa explains what rest is, who uses it, why it is used, and what you can do with it. Samisa walks you through consuming (or using) REST APIs and also how to setup your own APIs using the REST style and architecture.
I would recommend this book to any beginning and middle tiers PHP developer as it is a quick reference to REST and APIs that you know you already want to be working with.
Rating: 5 / 5
The cover of this book says, “Timely. Practical. Reliable.” and that is a good description of the book. It covers the current state of Java APIs for web services, it gives plenty of well thought out examples, and it provides enough information to actually make the alphabet soup of acronyms understandable. The book starts with an introduction to web services. The next section covers web services architecture and the standard technologies of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Interoperability with non-Java applications is demonstrated with a .NET example. The book is written by three Sun employees so it does tend to be a bit Sun-centric as the next sections shows. The Java Web Services Developers Pack (JWSDP) is given plenty of coverage. JAXP, JAXB, JAXM, JAX-RPC, JAXR, may be just acronyms when you get this book but after reading the six chapters covering the JWSDP they will be technologies that you understand. A case study wraps up the six chapters putting the whole thing together. The book ends with a chapter on security and a look at Sun ONE. The book is full of examples demonstrating how to use each of these technologies. When you read a line such as, “The real fun is understanding how the EncryptDecrypt class works,” you know you are dealing with authors who love code. For developing Java web services you will be hard pressed to find a better book than this one.
Rating: 5 / 5
As a Software Engineer looking to discover the patterns and concepts that are driving the SOA initiative I found this book to be extremely informative. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who hopes to become a successfully member of a SOA. The SOA initiative being done at my company has definitely benefited from our reading of Erl’s material.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is about how to create web-services using JAX-WS. Unfortunately, JAX-WS perpetuates the java-first RPC-style of web-service development. According to Thomas Erl, this violates several of the principles of service orientation and, as a result, these type of web-services do not belong in a SOA. The amazing thing is that the author acknowledges this but still devotes most of the book to doing it the wrong way.
While you can develop WSDL-first document-style web services with JAX-WS, it is not its primary mode of operation. There are several other very good frameworks which which encourage best practices and are generally more appropriate for web-service development in Java. My personal favorite is Spring Web Services.
Rating: 1 / 5
To give a brief background about myself. I have been one of the primary contributor and committer of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) eclipse tools project since its inception through WTP 1.5 release. I contributed the Validation Framework component for this project. I read a large portion of this book and can say that this most comprehensive book that explains the complete WTP in a step by step fashion that can be help you easily understand the whole WTP project, its sub projects, its components and features through several real world examples. I strongly recommend this book to all users and contributors of WTP.
The reason I bought this book was so I could quickly get through some hands-on examples and see the power of WTP. Also, I thought it would be really helpful to see various web development tools through the lens of Eclipse development. After going through it, though, I’m afraid I can’t recommend the book for those purposes.
But first, let me applaud the web development “wisdom” portions of the book. There are some really good “why are we doing this?” and “why are we doing it this way?” explanations in this book. Nothing to do with WTP, really, but these portions of the book were very well done.
The majority and purpose of the book are the hands-on exercises. Here’s where I had some issues. Throughout the exercises, the reader is always being asked to go out and download some tool or another. I spent way too much time at update sites, trying to get the right versions of things. I would rather all of this be established up-front. Just say “if you want to do all of the exercises, download these specific versions of these 8 tools”. Later, there can be some explanation as to why those tools over others, but lets get a platform that’s going to do everything, and not sprinkle installation issues throughout. In fact, I think that in an Eclipse book, they instructions should say, “start with a clean install of (some version of Eclipse) and build it with (these versions of these plugins), and you will be able to do every exercise.”
I know it’s not the job of the authors of this book to detail a tool’s installation, but a line like “check the (some tool) documentation for the exact list” is a cop out. Presumably, the authors just got done using the list, so a few words as to how to find the list within the documentation would be really helpful. With a little guidance, digging time could be reduced from an hour to two minutes.
The exercises had separate iterations, which I found helpful. I did run into discontinuities that required some improvisation, though. I’m pretty sure that nobody sat down with an empty machine, installed all of the tools and ran all of the exercises, start to finish. Or if they did, the book didn’t get updated.
The book was written using WTP 1.5, EJB 2.1, etc. These are older versions than what’s currently available, but it’s not a problem to run through the exercises with the older versions. The problem comes at the end of the exercise when they give you a “tease” about how cool the next version is. I resisted temptation for almost the whole book but finally I grabbed some updated versions to try out the cool new stuff! Bad idea. I backed-up to earlier exercises, and although I was able to replicate most of them under the newer versions of things, there’s not enough detail to get through quickly (lots of trial and error). And when I was finished, I wasn’t convinced it was an optimal result. But I just couldn’t sit still with the old versions when the authors were plugging the new versions.
A picky issue I have concerns references to other books. I don’t think they belong in the main text, really. They wouldn’t even need footnotes. Just a recommended reading by chapter would be sufficient. If you are more of an academic than someone who needs to apply this stuff quickly, maybe reading these other books might be a possibility, but I’ll tell you I’m not going to make time to read a 9 year old EJB book!
I’m not sure that pitching to a WTP user and a WTP volunteer developer in the same book was really in the flow of the book. This is a picky one too, and there weren’t that many pages dedicated to this topic. I suppose there’s a need to recruit, it’s just that I’m not sure the audience overlaps very much.
The bottom line for me is that a book should simplify the task of setting up the environment so that I can concentrate on the “why” and “how” of coding. Although I wouldn’t have enjoyed the “wisdom” and other continuity the book offered, I don’t think I saved any time on the development environment. I spent as much time tinkering with the development environment as I would have if I had just grabbed 6 or 8 tutorials from 6 or 8 different authors off of the internet.
Rating: 3 / 5
Very interesting read… Sas gets deep into talking about as3 xml. even though i wasnt too happy about not covering xmlsocket this book i would recommend this book to anyone who works a lot with xml. good job sas!
This book provides a pretty good overview of web services–although it’s a little heavy handed with xml. Bottom line is that i6t would be easy to wal away from this book thinking web services is simply xml schema–and miss the bigger picture.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is the perfect book for Managers. I also purchased the perfect book for developers and architects. It is entitled: java web services architecture. They both should be purchased together.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is very well written and covers the topic SOA in a very structured and clear way. The author approaches the topics from a real life perspective based on actual experiences. It provides exactly what the title promises.
This book does a good job at explaining a complex subject. My big complaint is that the way it handles certain things were easy on the author, not the reader. For example, why would I create an application that acts as a Web service, but have it running as a console application? Wouldn’t I much rather have it running as a proper Web service?
Rating: 3 / 5
I thought that this is a book very specific to certain aspects of web services and examples are overly detailed…I dont expect the book to be compiled mostly with elaborative examples.
Rating: 2 / 5
Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise- A step by Step Guide David S. Linthicum Published by Addison-Wesley
The author takes a practical approach to a project role out. Often the pace of technology outstrips the best of us. This book is a great help. For those tasked with setting up a cloud environment, the book gives you a good road map. If you are new to the concept and just adding to your knowledge base, the content is easily understood. It does not matter if you are a CEO or a student; the take away is an insightful understanding of Cloud Computing in general and for the Enterprise in particular.
Discussed is why the cloud matters and when you should use it. Some books just hype the subject, not this one. Instead, you get a clear understanding on what your ROI should be and the potential pitfalls. The book also covers the planned migration, breaking down each service and testing.
I would recommend this book for any person with an interest in Cloud Computing.
I’ve had this book for several months now, and read various sections of it. Though not all. Kinda lengthy, you know. But you can use just the portions needed for your stuff. Erl’s examples help give it flesh. I find the jargon is still sometimes too much. But he didn’t make that up. Seems to be what we all’re stuck with in SOA.
Be VERY cautious of some other recent reviews of the book. Two or three of them gave very negative reports. But mayhaps they didnt read very much of it? Hey check this out. Some of them only have done one review. Of this book. Bit suss, eh? Are those real reviews? Heck, are those real reviewers?
I did not find this book very helpful to implement web services. I would say it’s the introduction of webservices like a first lecture of a semester long class. You got the idea.
Rating: 1 / 5
Once again, authors David A. Chappell and Tyler Jewell produce a masterpiece of technical genius. Just when we thought they couldn’t top their opus maxum, we find yet another fine jewell in their collection.
Personally, I read Java Web Services in about 20 minutes, which is an amazing accomplishment considering I was asleep at the time.
This book gives object oriented programming a boost of adreline and steroids and allows them to all run on the same platform.
I first bought this book because I was looking for a compiler that I could run in AIX and EBCIDC, but then I just ported it to my Windows 98 machine because that was too complicated for me.
My favorite chapter was where Chappell illustrates the parable of the bicycle and the Java programmer. I wont tell too much or I’ll give it away. You’ll need to buy the book to find out more about the parable.
Needless to say that Larry King can’t be wrong about this book. He’s read it and is now programming CNN’s mainframe computers.
They said it could not be done, but I drank enough Java cola to read this sucker in 20 minutes. I’m reading it again right now as I type this review. I loved this book. I’m going to buy copies of it for my entire family. I gave one to my wife as an anniversary gift.
Buy it, you can’t go wrong, if for nothing else, buy it for the cool goat design on the cover.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve been using this book for over a year now to develop a production application with EWS. This is the only book out there on this topic that I am aware of, so you have little choice in the matter. Fortunately, the book is well-structured, well-written, and pretty comprehensive. And it is “straight from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak. The samples are very helpful. Per a previous reviewer’s complaint, they are all console-mode apps just to simplify their build and use. If you want to make a web service, you’ll have to adapt and extend. I was particularly grateful that for push notifications, the authors actually went to the trouble to write out an embedded HTTP listener instead of presuming you would be content to run under IIS.
Be aware that MS has a new, higher-level API in beta now, called the EWS Managed API. This newer API eliminates a lot of the drudge coding in the SOAP proxy API described in this book. I don’t think there has been an update to this book for the new API, but I would hope Mr. Sterling et al are planning one, or even better, a new book on this topic.
Rating: 5 / 5
While this book was quite up to date when it was published in 2002, the advances in the understanding of Web Services since then suggest that you consider a more recent text.
Specifically, there has been a buildout of Service Oriented Architecture, due to significant interest by many developers. Also, a new language has emerged – Business Process Execution Language. This was in response to people using WSDL and finding that while it adequately described a given Web Service, it had a harder time with more involved business logic. And with trying to aggregate multiple Web Services into a larger, dispersed entity. While one method might have been to upgrade WSDL, instead, BPEL was chosen. Starting afresh. But using WSDL and the ideas learnt from it.
Rating: 3 / 5
The author is very thorough with the xml uses with the appropriate examples
I needed the first five chapters to acquire the skills i needed to complement with the xslt. This book is good compared with some i have reviewed in the past 7 years.
Definitely novice to pro book as titled
Rating: 4 / 5
I have had some prior exposure to xml but by no means am an expert.
The writing sytle is easy to follow and the book contains plenty of examples, and tips to provide you with a greater understanding of the material. The book progresses with each chapter and builds upon what you have already covered.
The book explains the basics and simplifies some of the more complex aspects of XML in a format that is easy to follow.
I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn the XML.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am not a developer but I have to test interfaces based on a SOA that use XML. I needed a good book which would give me the basics of XML. For my purpose this book had more info than I needed. But it was easy to understand the concepts and the syntax of XML, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema and Namespaces.
Rating: 5 / 5
The worst technical book I’ve ever seen. Pages and pages of useless XML with a couple comments intermixed. 200 pages of worthless screenshots and not one practical example.
Rating: 1 / 5
If you’re looking for a single volume on XML to give you many of the answers you need, I would suggest checking out XML In A Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O’Reilly).
Chapter list: Introducing XML; XML Fundamentals; Document Type Definitions (DTDs); Namespaces; Internationalization; XML as a Document Format; XML on the Web; XSL Transformation (XSLT); XPath; XLinks; XPointers; XInclude; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO); Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL); XML as a Data Format; XML Schemas; Programming Models; Document Object Model (DOM); Simple API for XML (SAX); XML Reference; Schemas Reference; XPath Reference; XSLT Reference; DOM Reference; SAX Reference; Character Sets; Index
As you can see, there’s a lot of ground covered here. Since XML is such a diverse set of standards and technologies, different readers will probably get differing amounts of value from this book. For instance, if I was delving into CSS for a website project, this book wouldn’t give me much of what I need. The coverage on CSS is very light and introductory. Conversely, if I was starting to use SAX, the initial chapter on SAX along with the reference chapter would give me a solid foundational base from which to work. It seems that most of the quality material is found in the core XML standards. And as with most Nutshell books, they are not meant to be tutorials for the beginner. They provide a no-fluff reference for the professional to refer back to for quick answers. This book coupled with a stand-alone book on a specific XML standard would be a great combination.
Is it perfect? No. But it will give you a lot of information in a single location that will prevent you from having to comb through multiple other volumes.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a great reference book for people interested in SOA. It contains in-depth definitions on SOA terms and concepts. The best part of the book is that is uses real world situations that a reader can relate too to describe the uage of SOA design patterns.
Rating: 5 / 5
Eben Hewitt’s JAVA SOA COOKBOOK provides programmers and collections catering to them with a fine review of SOA architecture standards, packed with Java and XML code and recipes alike. From building data models for SOA applications and real-world web services to improving reliability and working with forms, URIs, and custom bindings, this is a ‘must’ for any serious web programmer working with Java applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
I like this book and am still reading it and I think I can pick up lots of skills and knowledge about Web Services. One more thing I want to mention here is that I accidentally hit a button on amazon web pages for purchasing this book so I ended up buying 2 copies of this book, a hard copy and a soft copy. I should get refund on the soft copy becuase I never review it online. The following is the part of the order info for the soft copy:
I got this book as my first web service reference and haven’t needed another. Trying to learn WS technology by reading the standards was pretty daunting. I eventually came to find out that many companies don’t provide all the pieces. They’ll promote some proprietary legacy technology (that isn’t quite useless), or worse, label an early (functional) product ‘obsolete’ and then never release the new-and-improved successor. This book brought everything together and explained a lot of the side issues and practical trade-offs. I especially appreciated the way the book maps standards (e.g., JAX-RPC) to an implementation (in this case, Apache Axis) using UML. The accompanying web site ([...]) provides updated content and code samples.
While this book is WebSphere-oriented in the development examples, the accompanying explanation provides ample information to permit the reader to adapt them to other Java tools. Developers living in the C++ and .NET worlds might benefit from an additional book, but the practical explanations and breadth of coverage of this one make it valuable to anyone working (or just trying to come to grips) with web services.
Rating: 4 / 5
Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java(TM) Web Applications
This is an excellent book; I specially liked the iterative approach (for example, for presentation tier, iteration 1: HTML, iteration 2: add CSS, iteration 3: add Javascripts, iteration 4: XML and XSLT, iteration 5: DTD)authors have taken. I have used examples from this book, with Eclipse and NetBeans, of course for Eclipse user this book has added value, since it goes through configuration of Eclipse and recommended practices. Please ignore the gripe about errors in the code; there are two minor errors which are detailed in the errata on book’s companion site, it doesn’t take more than a minute to fix those two issues.
Authors discuss All three tiers in great detail. How about this, by page 85 you would be deploying a simple web service (and you would be amazed how simple it is).
True, this book provides a comprehensive look at XML Schema, but the order that the material is presented in leaves much to be desired. It is not until chapter 7 that we begin to learn how to string together element declarations to start building a schema. Chapters 1-6 deal with XML Schema history, a sort of quick tour that does not take the place of a tutorial, Namespaces, Schema composition, Instances and Documentation and extentions. While the “inverted pyramid” approach to revealing information may be academically correct — it has not helped me learn XML Schema efficiently. This book is essentially a retelling of the W3C XML Schema Recommendation.
. Based on a search here at Amazon, it looks like there may be a book coming from O’Reilly based on this material.
I gave the book 3 stars, as the book seems to be accurate and complete. I don’t think that having this book is necessarily a bad thing, perhaps just a bad place to start.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book was very helpful in getting me up to speed with XML Schema. It was written well and I have provided the added detail I needed to go above and beyond up at work. Priscilla’s Walmsley’s extensive experience is conveyed well in the book and has proven to be a great resource.
Rating: 4 / 5
I teach Java for a living, and this is clearly one of the best book for understanding web services using Java. It does an outstanding job of explaining many of the examples using Sun Java web services apis and it includes examples for using axis, weblogic etc. The microsoft .net interoperability and architecture case-study chapter makes it worth more.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author’s knowledge is unbelievable. I can’t imagine how one person could know a subject so deeply.
The tough part of SOA is that there are so many ways to do it: the tip of the iceberg is rpc or document, literal or encoded, wrapped or bare. And the deeper you get, the more architectural decisions there are e.g., java first or contract first, or “in the middle.” Hewitt gives you exactly the perspective you need to make these decisions.
Web services is very interesting and it is the most talked topic in software development field. I have purchased two books on Web services and this one was the most comprehensive and got right to the point on how to build Java webservices (using Weblogic, Axis, JWSDP), and also shows to how consume them using even Microsoft .NET. This book has an excellent real-world case study which walksthrough how to develop and deploy complete web services with all Java API components showing all Web services components (SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) working together. This book is an excellent companion for Java developers who wish to develop web services using JWSDP, Axis and Weblogic.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve just seen this book and am pleased with the focus and attention to detail. Beyond the useful framework to get up to speed with web services, you can see the details that tells you the authors know what they are doing. If you are building Web Services and using Java tools–which you should be doing!–this book is what you need.
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book to be very insightful and perfect for my situation. Which is to have an overview on the various technologies as they may apply to the electronic security industry. Prior to having this book, I found myself coming back to the office to Google various technologies, now I feel that I at least have heard of and even understand (although mostly on the surface) many of these concerns clients bring up. I found the book especially suited for taking a subject that I am not particularly interested in and making it easy to comprehend while injecting enough humor to make an otherwise relatively dry subject funny.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you want one book that describes HOW TO BUILD real world Java Web services applications successfully, then this is it. I’ve read a number of related books that describe many aspects of Java APIs Web services and have always been left wanting, how to put all the WEBSERVICES BUILDING BLOCKS together using Java APIs. This is the ONLY JAVA WEBSERVICES BOOK which I read so far which demonstrates a WEB SERVICES ARCHITECTURE with all components together with working code.
I am sure Java developers and architects will all get value out of this book because it provides the working content for building Web services using the J2EE platform by walking through the Web services development from architecture, design, implemention and deployment. Some of the key features of this book, you will learn and demonstrate are:
- Building Web services from J2EE components - Explore the JAX APIs – JAX-RPC, JAXM, SAAJ and JAXR with examples. - Explore Java Web services interoperability with Microsoft .NET. - Learn to build a real world Web services, putting all the JAX APIs together. - Learn how to implement security for Web services. - Learn how to develop Web services using Sun JWSDP, Apache Axis, BEA Weblogic, Microsoft .NET and IBM Web services Security kit.
For my eyes, this book is a Java developer’s companion for building Web services but not an “Idiot’s Guide”. So don’t expect the book to teach you how to write the “Hello World” Java or teaching basics.
Rating: 5 / 5
With this edited tutorial covering all the parts of SOA Suite 11g (from BPEL, via Mediator, Rules, as well as Human Workflow – all the way to B2B and Oracle’s Service Bus) it’s by far the best way to get a head start into the fundamentals of the platform at unprecedented breath.
Heidi and her team have done a tremendous job to structure the labs and hands-on exercises in a didactic, explanatory way – with solutions all the way through. This way the book serves not just as a tutorial, but also as a reference bible when it comes to implementation of specific features and concepts.
Clemens Utschig-Utschig, Platform Architect, SOA Suite
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is the best resource for Exchange development, written by the developers who work on Exchange Web Services (EWS) this book is a must-have for any developer that is thinking about writing applications against Exchange. I can’t recommend it enough for the examples, in depth explanations, and entertaining writing
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book a great introduction into the technical relevant issues of SOA. The book in particular helped me get a head start when I pitched my research to a CTO of a major insurance company involved over the last 5 years in SOA evolution (after much groundwork, I was given two hours of his precious time to convince him that there is value in my research for his organization, and was expected to make an in-depth case for the relevance of my work to his SOA evolution effort). Because the book prepared me well, I could follow with ease all overview and detailed design discussion, and also contribute to the technical discussion, which significantly contributed to the success of the meeting. I warmly recommend the book to anyone who wants to get a head start into technical but also organizational aspects of SOA in organizations.
Rating: 5 / 5
I chose this book after reading the glowing reviews here at Amazon, hoping to use it as an introductory tutorial to XML. I was disappointed!
The writing style chosen by the author is terse, as if writing space is at a premium – and this for a book which is 600+ pages long. The examples are badly chosen in my opinion, and the explanation of basic concepts is presented in the style of a reference manual. Take for example the explanation of the NOTATION element attribute: “A notation type attribute contains the name of a notation declared in the document’s DTD… In theory, it could be used to associate types with particular elements, as well as limiting the types associated with the elements”.
At this stage, I gave up on this book and went instead to Hunter’s “Beginning XML”. Still, all wasn’t lost: I read a colleague’s copy, so at least I wasn’t out of pocket.
Rating: 2 / 5
I gave this book some harsh reviews three weeks ago. Doubt and uncertainty about my assessment crept in as I kept reading all the other glowing reviews. So I gave it another try. And I found out I was being unfair. The book is in fact worse than I originally thought. Its littered with childish diagrams and metaphors who do nothing but add to the page count. The font and spacing are also cleverly crafted to increment book mass rather than understanding. It is painful to read as the author dilutes his meager message with summaries and overviews and summaries of overviews. I cannot even tell if the book is accurate because the information contents are so slim as to take hours to extract the smallest sliver of knowledge. Readers looking for succinct, honest or well reasoned material will be sorely disappointed. I would recommend instead they look at “Enterprise SOA” by Krafzig et al.
Rating: 2 / 5
While the samples are straight-forward, to the point and easy to follow, the book doesn’t really provide enough under-the-cover view. Generally speaking, if you are looking for some insight into WS used with Google, eBay, FedEx, etc. this is a wonderful book.
If you are looking into information for things such as “using Axis for real-world WS”, this just scratches the surface.
However…
This book provided a wonderful set of quick, easy test setups for use against generic WS implementations (such as those provided in B2Bi software) for comparative results. The peer into the provider-specific details made it wonderful to have provide expected output and check the diffs on files.
Recommended for QA, unit testing, automated testing, etc.
Recommended for those interested in quick samples but not in a core understanding of the technologies.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is, as far as I know, the only full length treatment of XML in .NET/C# 2008. The author has an “advanced” text, but this is based on .NET/C# 2005. This current volume serves well as both an introduction as well as a solid reference text to the full range of XML operation and usage. Chapter coverage is:
Manipulating via DOM model
Reading and Writing XML Documents
XPath
Validation
XSLT
ADO.NET
Serialization
Web Services
SQL Server
Use in .NET Framework
Creating Services in Windows Communication Foundation
LINQ to SML
But, the introduction of LINQ to XML has a “2nd generation” approach to XML reading, writing and manipulation in the Framework. The current volume devotes one chapter at 32 pages to the topic — clear but relatively scant.
If you think you may want to use LINQ to XML, Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (Windows.Net) offers an extended discussion at 150 pages — with an excellent compare and contrast with the DOM version. That provides a good analysis of the approach best for your tasks and a solid explanation of implementation.
Rating: 4 / 5
The book is trying to incorporate lots of stuff, in the process confusing the programmers. I have lots of experience with VB and ASP and the reason I bought this book was because I thought that I can improve upon my internet skills and also because I understood that XML was a relatively easy technology to learn. But the author in this book is just introducing the programmer to various xml related technologies without explaining clearly what is for what and what is deemed as useful for average programmer.
Maybe I was confused when I bought this book!!
Rating: 1 / 5
By far one of the best XML books on the market today!!
As professionals, time is money. Why buy an XML book that’s 400+ pages when you can learn XML the fast, easy and enjoyable way? if you want a comprehensive reference guide read the W3C Specs, If I want to learn XML read this book!
I’ve just seen this book and am happy with the focus and the attention to detail. Beyond the useful framework to get up to speed with web services, you can see the details that tells you the authors know what they are doing. If you are building Web Services and using Java tools–which you should be doing!–this book is what you need. Whether your interest is in programming Web Services, in using technologies like XML or SOAP, or just in understanding why Web Services are generating so much excitement, I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have been using Carey’s book for the last 3 times I have taught XML at the community college level. I have reviewed numerous books on the market that either are too ethereal or are based on a programming environment or developer-based rather than just XML the Technology. While I use a mix of the supplied (by Course) and my own material, some students seem to bash Course books as though it is a foregone conclusion that the material will be bad.
I have found that if a student applies themselves to the material presented they get a great deal out of it. XML is non-trivial and must be pursued with an eye on detail. Unfortunately, many students don’t seem to want to develop that.
The people who have reviewed this book and bashed it–come up with a better alternative that is simple enough for even a newbie developer AND is not programming-based. If you know of one I’m all ears.
By the way, I have no relationship to Course Technology or the author Carey.
I bought this book in the hopes of learning some of the problems that my company might encounter as we launch down the web services path along with the rest of the computer industry. My searches on the internet for this kind of information resulted mostly in about 90% positive comments about web services (which made me suspicious) and 10% incomprehensible ranting. This book certainly delivers comprehensive analysis that doesn’t come off as too positive or overly critical either (after all, if web services were really bad, then why would everyone be using them?)
While I found the book pretty funny, be warned – some of the humor is a little adult-oriented. If you’re a hard core religious type or don’t like edgy humor, the book probably isn’t for you. It’s definitely not your average computer book.
Rating: 4 / 5
I can truly say that Thomas Erl is probably one of very few that truly understands Web services and SOA. His books (both of them) are an architects companion when it comes to coming up with an enterprise-wide solution. Thomas depicts the pro’s and con’s of each approach and gives the reader an insight into what a Service-Oriented Architecture can bring to the picture.
“Of the many books that cover Web services and SOA, Service-Oriented-Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services will certainly go down in history as one of the best. It’s the only book of its kind that covers the latest and the greatest Web services protocols.”
For anyone new to cloud computing, what it is, how to assess it suitability to your environment, challenges you need to consider, thought process to assist in making some crucial decisions – this is it. The first few chapters provides a good deal of information on the aspects to consider on whether or not clouds is for your organization. If cloud is suitable for your environment, the second set of chapters outlines a through process driven by SOA, particulars on what is/not cloud material etc. Great book on this subject.
Rating: 5 / 5
i’m very disappointed after reading the book. the contents were “OK” and explained technical details; however, it completely lacks why you would ever use web services, etc. so, if you are already using web services, this book might be for you. Nevertheless, if you are looking for answers what web services really are(e.g. when to use them, etc.), this book doesn’t provide the answers. Save your money.
Rating: 1 / 5
I wish it was more practical with better scenarios to guide architects through schema and business object definitions, gotchas and more. It gives areas to think about such as Project Managers roles, this is valuable. It could be better if updated… for example how do some of the new frameworks for persistence or distributed transactions fit?
Rating: 3 / 5
This author does a terrific job of examining all aspects of XML when coding in a C# project. I had a project in which using XML made great sense so I bought this book to answer my questions and get up to speed quickly which happened. His examples work and are well explained. Great job!
Rating: 5 / 5
Hansen offers the serious and experienced java programmer a way to learn Java Web Services, based on Java EE 5, which is probably the most heavily used version right now. (Version 6 has just come out and the book’s code should easily run under it.)
The bulk of the text essentially works through very detailed examples using JWS and associated (recent) standards like JAXB 2. The gist is to be able to write java code that can take XML output from some Web Service out there on the net, and let you composite it into another Web Service. It’s still not trivial to do. The code fragments assume a working knowledge of several current standards. Hansen is correct when he says that this is much easier than it would have been just a few years ago. The recent upgrades to java and the standards make this possible. But keep in mind that easier does not necessarily mean simple.
One passage in the text might appeal to those hapless enough to have dealt with XSLT. Several years ago, XSLT was promoted as the method to transform one XML representation to another. Several books have been written about this topic. But (bitter) experience has shown that XSLT is a remarkably cumbersome and obtuse way of doing things. What Hansen demonstrates is that JAXB 2 can be used in place of XSLT. Seems much more straightforward. Though to be fair, more practise will be needed doing this, to see if it holds true for other XML transformations.
Rating: 4 / 5
A lot of the books I’ve seen on web services are either too low level or too high level. This one was just about right. It presented just the facts you needed to know and explained why you would do this. Very concise and to the point.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you’re ready to propel your enterprise into the next technological realm – if you’re interested in architecting an enterprise that is agile enough to respond to rapidly changing business drivers – if you’re ready for a revolution in traditional approaches to technology innovation, then this book is the light in what has been a somewhat obscure tunnel. Author Melvin Greer gives a timely, insightful, and easy to grasp roadmap for leveraging SOA, and more specifically web services-based SOA, to realize dramatic improvement in interoperability, scalability, flexibility, reusability and the all important cost efficiency.
Rating: 5 / 5
There’s no question that HTML is neat. It tells a web browser how to display text in a way that the writer desired. But, and it’s a very big BUT, if you want to go to a web site and get the page, and then extract some data from that page into your own program, you have a problem. The answer is XML.
This page you are reading now has the title of the book on it. The title is in bigger, bolder type. How would you go about extracting the title? It clearly has some kind of HTML commands around it. But they could be bold, strong, em, h1, h2, etc. You’d have to know exactly what the program was putting out and then expect that it never would change.
If it were in XML it would say something like [title]title goes here[/title] (in reality thesquare brackets are angle brackets, just like HTML). You would know exactly what to seach for as the delimiters of the title itself. This is, of course a simplified example, but you get the idea.
This book, typical of an O’Reilly book is professionally written by and for professionals. If it’s your task to begin outputting data in XML, this is the essential reference book you’ll want on your desk.
Rating: 5 / 5
Good news! If you are an IT leader, developer, or architect, or a non-technical person for whom IT subjects are an important part of your work, this book is for you. I highly recommend it.
The book is written based on reality and in-depth experience rather than hype, buzz words, or the latest technological “flavor of the month.” While accepting the reality of the Cloud, as the author puts it, “[this] is a book promoting good architecture practices by leveraging the best from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing.” I agree wholeheartedly with this depiction. If you have to buy only one book on Cloud computing or its marriage with SOA, this is it!
David Linthicum, a renowned author and thought leader on the subject, is handing us vital knowledge about Cloud computing, all in one concise package. In addition, the informal writing style of the author makes the information more accessible to a wide range of readers. The more you read and learn about the subjects of Cloud computing and SOA , in general, the more you will realize that this book is an invaluable resource, whether this is your first book on the subject or you already have a stack of related books.
Just as the clouds in our planet’s atmosphere are everywhere to a varying degree, right now, whether you are aware of it or not, Cloud computing is also everywhere in our computational life to a varying degree. We are only in the beginning of this computing Renaissance. I think that, just as in the actual history of the Renaissance, the changes in the IT world through Cloud computing will not be uniform across all markets. Some will benefit from it immensely, while others will lag behind. The knowledge handed to the reader through this book will help you to focus better and position you to take advantage of Cloud computing and SOA more quickly. As correctly pointed out by the book, in order to take full advantage of Cloud computing, we need architecture and discipline inside of the enterprise, such as SOA.
I agree with the author’s description of his book that, “This is more than just a book that defines some technology; this book defines a class of technology as well as approaches and strategies to make things work within your enterprise.” With this book and its key knowledge, you can sling-shot your efforts and seize the moment. The alternative is to go solo and, through trial and error, maybe get there eventually, after losing time and opportunities.
If you miss this book, you put yourself at greater risk of missing out on opportunities that are waiting for you out there.
SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility is a fantastic book which shows how any service-oriented architecture project can be run more predictably and productively, decreasing cost and increasing ROI. The architects and project managers in charge of any significant SOA project should know the material in this book.
The book is written by four very knowledgeable SOA practitioners at IBM (which also explains why it’s published by IBM Press). Books written by multiple authors often read as independent chapters that don’t flow as a book, but these authors have collaborated well to produce a consistent whole. They have distilled their knowledge of how to manage SOA projects into what is really two books in one: 1) A model for managing SOA projects via 2) A process for performing SOA projects. The latter is based on tasks which produce work products, specific concrete deliverables which make project management much more straightforward. The latter half of Chapter 3 is a catalog of governance work product types, and Chapter 4 catalogs service development work product types. These form the basis for the SOA governance model described in Chapter 5, which details step-by-step tasks in the processes for governing the development of SOA applications, tasks which create the work products described previously.
I enjoyed all the touches of simple, practical advice spread throughout the book. One example is “Our experience has been that establishing a dedicated SOA CoE [Center of Excellence] is one of the most important organizational changes the governance planning team can make.” (p. 237) Another example is the sections titled “What Distinguishes the SOA Winners?” and “Antipatterns: Common SOA Pitfalls.” (pp. 43-50) Almost every section begins with a quotation that has nothing to do with SOA governance and yet usually illustrates the section quite nicely. For example, the section on “Governance Mechanisms” (p. 33) beings with this quote attributed to Colin Powell: “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”
No book is perfect, nor is this one. Chapter 6 on managing the lifecycle is not as strong and badly needs more copyediting. For example, after doing a nice job of distinguishing between processes and tasks (p. 268), other parts of the chapter start distinguishing between tasks and what are sometimes called processes but sometimes called services. I’d also quibble that they focus overly much on whether operations can be automated since it’s also valid for a task in a process to be a human task. Nevertheless, these complaints are minor in what overall is a collection of very useful information.
(Disclaimer: I, like the authors of this book, am employed by IBM.)
Simple to understand and readable. I like the book ir recommend it to the software development community. The introduction is great and the material is well structured i also think that the book should become a text book for graduate students
Rating: 5 / 5
Editor Jeff Rafter contributes more information to this field than any other person on Earth. I think they should have named this book “XML Perfected, By: Jeff Rafter and other anonymous people–that, while not as brilliant, are passable.” Hand him a lollipop and call him Uncle Einstein.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have read a number of books on SOA, but this book is by far the broadest and most practical. Written by a practitioner of SOA, the author covers real world implementation challenges and best practices.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a must for all developers that want to benefit from the new Exchange Web Services protocols. MSDN documentation is not that great, but the book explains the internals, data types and procedures, giving clear examples. You can’t go wrong with it, especially when developing using .NET
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is a great read and furthers the understanding of what Service Orientation is actually about. As a side issue, the book is beautifully composed.
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s not a business book. It doesn’t cover the reasons for using the various technologies well enough for that. The information provided is the kind of simple overview you can get from just surfing the web on these subjects.
It’s not a technical book. The details are too sparse for this.
It’s not a humor book, though it tries to be.
The thing it does best is try to mimic, or at least bring to mind, successful creative efforts (note the lookalike cover).
Go find something from O’Reilly instead.
Rating: 1 / 5
My problem with this book is that I was hoping it would concentrate more on just XML Schema, something I think most people would prefer. Of course, how I am qualified to make that kind of statement is beyond me But here is my reasoning: A fairly large portion of the book covers DTDs, RELAX NG, and Schematron. DTDs, while ubiquitous, are being supplanted by XML Schema. Usage of RELAX NG and Schematron are, by the book’s own admission, not widespread. So it seems that all three of these technologies could have been admitted, as were many other XML-related technologies (XSLT, XPath, etc.)
In addition, I feel the regular-expression-like inclusions should have been omitted. These include something referred to as Productions in one part of the book and Contents in another. Maybe good for hard-core CS people, but pretty much useless for those of us who just want to work with XML Schema. An ideal replacement would have been some examples illustrating sample usage of various elements and attributes.
All in all, the descriptions accompanying the elements and attributes are pretty good. Unfortunately, that accounts for only about one-third of the book. But it only costs $10 and it is small, so maybe it’s worth it.
Rating: 2 / 5
Since all other reviews are very positive, I’m here to offer a different opinion.
I’ve had this book for over a year now, and I barely use it. Each time I attempt to find something useful in it, the information is scattered over the entire book making it extremely difficult to understand.
For example, right now I’m looking up the “ref” attribute, and according to the index, it appears on 7 different locations throughout the book, each portion shorter than 1 page. Also, I have seen many tables scattered throughout with exact same information, or one or two differing field values, making it very confusing to understand which table is doing what.
And at over 500 pages long, there is a large amount of filler information in this book.
Is this book “definitive”? It looks like it is. Is this book usable? Absolutely not. This is one of the worst investments I’ve made in computer books.
And there is a place about strings in the book where it differs from the official W3C specs.
Rating: 2 / 5
The book is good for the people who want to start building services right away with Axis2 Implementation. I read only few chapters before I switched to web logic services so this book didn’t help much. But It definitely gives you all the screenshots to quickly use Axis2. There is a feature called Code Generator which can be used inside eclipse. Using this tool you can generate stubs skeletons etc using Axis2. I folllowed the step given in the book but couldn’t install it or use it. Not sure who to blame.
My advice – Buy it if you want to build services usign Axis2 Quickly.
Rating: 3 / 5
If you are going to write Hello World type web services then simple to the point books are ok. If you are going to write web services for Fortune 500 companies then it becomes important to understand all the details and this is where the book falls short.
If you are casual about the topic, then I highly recommend it, otherwise purchase a serious book such as Java Web Services Architecture.
Rating: 3 / 5
Good news! If you are an IT leader, developer, or architect, or a non-technical person for whom IT subjects are an important part of your work, this book is for you. I highly recommend it.
The book is written based on reality and in-depth experience rather than hype, buzz words, or the latest technological “flavor of the month.” While accepting the reality of the Cloud, as the author puts it, “[this] is a book promoting good architecture practices by leveraging the best from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing.” I agree wholeheartedly with this depiction. If you have to buy only one book on Cloud computing or its marriage with SOA, this is it!
David Linthicum, a renowned author and thought leader on the subject, is handing us vital knowledge about Cloud computing, all in one concise package. In addition, the informal writing style of the author makes the information more accessible to a wide range of readers. The more you read and learn about the subjects of Cloud computing and SOA , in general, the more you will realize that this book is an invaluable resource, whether this is your first book on the subject or you already have a stack of related books.
Just as the clouds in our planet’s atmosphere are everywhere to a varying degree, right now, whether you are aware of it or not, Cloud computing is also everywhere in our computational life to a varying degree. We are only in the beginning of this computing Renaissance. I think that, just as in the actual history of the Renaissance, the changes in the IT world through Cloud computing will not be uniform across all markets. Some will benefit from it immensely, while others will lag behind. The knowledge handed to the reader through this book will help you to focus better and position you to take advantage of Cloud computing and SOA more quickly. As correctly pointed out by the book, in order to take full advantage of Cloud computing, we need architecture and discipline inside of the enterprise, such as SOA.
I agree with the author’s description of his book that, “This is more than just a book that defines some technology; this book defines a class of technology as well as approaches and strategies to make things work within your enterprise.” With this book and its key knowledge, you can sling-shot your efforts and seize the moment. The alternative is to go solo and, through trial and error, maybe get there eventually, after losing time and opportunities.
If you miss this book, you put yourself at greater risk of missing out on opportunities that are waiting for you out there.
I am not a web developer, I have bought several other aws related scripts and I always have been able to implement them on my websites. I bought this book in hope of getting more control over display of products on my website.
(…)
Some interesting exercises at the end of chapter, but no hints or working examples.
There is no after sales support for assistance with customization of the examples. Usually autors create their forums where users can help each other, but we don’t even have a forum for this book.
Lots of information , it might be a good book for an expert Web Developer.
The book is excellent for an experienced Java developer. Some JAX-WS practical knowledge is almost a must as the book dives into very details and you would get lost if you didn’t work with JAX-WS (Metro) before. But that’s exactly what I needed. Definitely recommended. I don’t know any better JAX-WS book so far and so comprehensive.
The only downside could be that it’s an early bird and thus is based on first GlassFish/Metro implementation (JAX-WS 2.0) and doesn’t cover WebSphere web services or any extensions going beyond JAX-WS. But hey, that is a story for a different book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The thing that I like about this book is that it is very practical and real about SOA Governance. A lot of the articles and books that I’ve read on this subject kind of talk about SOA Governance in theory, or take an attempt at describing a fictional companies governance, but don’t really get down to the level of detail that I’m looking for. This one does.
In no particular order, here are the things that helped me understand the nuts and bolts of SOA Governance:
1. An SOA Governance Paradigm (model) that gave me a good mental grasp of how to think about governance – standards, policies, mechanisms, metrics, procedures, and how these entities relate to the governed entity.
2. A framework for SOA Governance that focused on 4 domains and 26 capabilities. This allowed me to consider all aspects of governance and to rate governance for its current and desired maturity and then create a heat map of needs to guide the governance transition plan.
3. I really liked the section on `suitability considerations’. We all know that there is no one size fits all governance pattern and the 9 levels of governance discussed just really hit home for me.
4. The mapping of business considerations such as `Sell more by outgrowing competitors’ and `Cost less by reducing operating expenses’ to the governance capabilities was something that our business guys found interesting and actually made them more interested in SOA Governance.
5. The concept of `Service Factory’ was an eye opener and the usage of governance to automate the service factory really made sense. It gave me a good talking point when dealing with management in the development groups. The information on governance control points was very specific and helpful.
6. Did I say this book is specific? There is a long list and description of governance work products. While not all of them were relevant to our situation, it nevertheless caused me to think about and make explicit decisions instead of not doing something out of sheer ignorance.
7. The information on governance organizations and roles and responsibilities is alone worth the price of the book.
8. The case study didn’t cover everything, but it gave me enough real world situations to bring home the points that were being made in each chapter.
9. Lots of interesting quotes to spice things up – my favorite from Abe Lincoln – `Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe’.
Hurray. At last. A slender book that tries to show you the essence of Web Services, in as simple a fashion as possible. Unlike much larger texts on this subject, Iverson eshews a comprehensive approach. Instead, he strives to describe the gist of WS.
He gives this substance by showing how to hook into the WS APIs published by eBay, Google, Amazon and FedEx, to build a composite WS. This modular approach to constructing from independent sources is the driving force behind WS. The code examples are necessarily verbose. But not really that intricate. Here is your chance to be demystified about WS. Now if you find afterwards that you still want to continue, then you’re probably ready, and need, one of those other texts.
Rating: 5 / 5
Wow – what a waste! It’s one thing to waste the money but it’s all the more painful when you also waste time reading just to realize you wasted money on a book.
If you’re a fan of the Thomas Erl SOA series, you won’t be disappointed with his latest installment. This book is packed with real-world design patterns and is a great resource for SOA architects and developers alike.
Rating: 4 / 5
I thought this book was insightful and it really was pretty funny. It has clear explanations of many technologies that include not only strengths and weaknesses, but also the mistakes and misuses. I haven’t been able to find this type of information from other sources. I found myself chuckling a fair amount too.
Rating: 5 / 5
Not that dated, you will get the background that is behind all the hype and you will get some hands on. Not a first choice but it is a solid review and a book I still keep on my desk. Get this and of course one of the newer titles. The new ones may be hyping something that isn’t going to happen, at least with this one you will find most of the topics still are the cornerstones of web services. There is gold in them there hills, and those hills are strewn with books discarded too soon as old. Many explain things very well and offer knowledge. Nice book.
Rating: 4 / 5
SOA: PRINCIPLES OF SERVICE DESIGN is another example of Thomas Erl writing a book that explains in easier to understand terms the world of SOA. In my opinion, the book kept the information basic enough for a beginner and advanced enough to keep the interest of more SOA knowledgeable individuals. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of his next book. I highly recommend not only this book but his series!
Rating: 5 / 5
I have several books on Web Services. This is the one I use the most. It needs to be updated. Web Services is still evolving too quick for books to keep up. I cannot wait for the second edition of this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a great book in that the author provides comprehensive coverage of a complicated subject, and does it in clear, concise and understandable language. The book should be a promary resource for programmers. I look forward to more contributions from this author.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is possibly the worst book ever written on any topic. If you want to spend hours frustrated in front of the computer trying to get the poorly written tutorials to work, then by all means by this book. It’s a shame it is even printed on paper. Oxygen-providing trees were chopped down needlessly to make this book. Such a waste for no beneficial result. I only give this one star because zero stars was not an option.
Rating: 1 / 5
Mr. Greer’s book is a quick read and blueprint for individuals and businesses seeking a method for delivering value through web services. It focuses on delivering value to customers as a trusted advisor; provides ways of reducing their overall costs; and reveals new ideas for transforming customers’ business through web services and service oriented architecture. It is a must read!
Rating: 5 / 5
I think this is one of the best web services book that I have read. It does not give extra information and explains only what is needed. Anyone can deploy there web service and start experimenting with it in no time using this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
One of the most clear-headed presentations of SOA concepts. It also deals with some of SOA’s difficult problems (versioning, governance, incompatible data representations, etc.) that are often ignored by other books. It is a book that focuses on concepts and architecture. Other books are better suited for learning the nuts and bolts technical implementation details.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you had to time or money for just one book on Web Services, this would be it. The book truly delivers on different perspectives namely, business, training, architecture, development, operational and “future”. You start by learning enough to convince your boss (or clients, in my case) of the benefits of using your approach and then proceed to master the whole XML based implementations as well. Dense read, though: there is enough material in each chapter to cover an entire book. If you are a java programmer, it makes it even better, most probably because the book came out in 2003 when Microsoft .NET was still pretty clueless about all this web services stuff anyway. Even the J2EE world is way ahead of the book in terms of implementation. Still an excellent read, so my only request would be…a second, updated edition!
Rating: 5 / 5
Sorry for the bad pun, but this is a great book. If you’re looking for comprehensive, easy to understand book on SOA, this is it.
After sitting in on one of Thomas Erl’s seminar’s, this book provided a great follow-up, providing an in-depth coverage of SOA computing concepts and benefits.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers the topic of web services, primarily from a Java perspective. It assumes a familiarity with Java and XML so as to be able to follow the code examples. The chapters are as follows: Welcome To Web Services, Inside The Composite Computing Model, SOAP: The Cornerstone Of Interoperability, SOAP-RPC, SOAP-Faults, and Misunderstandings, Web Services Description Language, UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, JAX-RPC and JAXM, J2EE and Web Services, Web Services Interoperability, and Web Services Security.
Review If you read the chapter headings and say “What does THAT mean?”, then you probably have a reasonability good idea as to whether this book is for you. As stated in the preface, this is not a “For Dummies” treatment of web services. While it covers all the different technologies that make up web services, it does it at a pretty high level of detail with a lot of code samples in Java.
The good thing here is that many of the examples are given using the Apache Tomcat server as the mechanism for processing the request. This is great in that you can download that software for free from the Apache site. This book doesn’t go into detail as to how Tomcat is set up and configured, however. You need to work through that on your own. Once you get to that point, you can use Tomcat to play with the examples that are used throughout the book. While they can look complex and intimidating, you can learn a lot from them.
As a Notes/Domino developer, I learned a lot by reading the book. Am I ready to start developing web services? Not hardly. But I do understand more of the concepts behind how they work. Since web services often use servlets to process requests, Notes/Domino 5 doesn’t fit the traditional picture of the technology. But since web services usually involve SOAP XML statements sent to a server, there’s no reason you couldn’t program a web service in Domino as a web agent that runs when a user submits a web page or runs a URL that activates a server agent. The processing is done and then returned to the client as an XML page. Once you read and digest the basic concepts behind it all, it all starts to come together.
Conclusion If you are a Notes/Domino developer who is trying to understand “web services”, this book could be useful. The book gets progressively more complex and detailed, so you may find yourself skimming at the end. If you are to the point of being ready to run an implementation of a servlet and SOAP engine (like Tomcat), this book will help you get started with your understanding of web services.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been reading this book on a Kindle and it works but it is not excellent. The structure of the book is good you get explanation of XML and how it works. The problem I feel I would like to have a more “concentrated” book. in this book XML XSD XSLT etc should be explained but the language in the book is as it is in many computer books a little bit to talkative. I would preffer a book that focus on SQL Servers implementation of XML and not in a half stringent way tries to explain XSD et al.
Reading in a Kindle I would like to have more links, better pictures (Kindle support for zooming in picture is not good), a more compact book where .query is explained in just one place.
I recommend the book but there are areas that can be improved.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book has got a decent content about XML. But, most pages have been added to technologies that aren’t being used much and just adds bulk to the book. A little rhetoric and not always concise to the point; but can live with it. Over all a good reference book. 3 Stars.
Rating: 3 / 5
And yet this book covers every aspect of web service development utilizing perl. As a long time user of the original Frontier::RPC2 module, things have come a long way, and with that greater complexity, the concepts have grown in scope considerably. This IS the book that you want to read if you REALLY want to understand SOAP and XML-RPC. From the XML DTD’s to implementation code (either standalone applications or utilizing mod_perl) this book covers everything in between. In all it is a welcome addition to the O’Reilly family of Perl books.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was amazed to see how well this book explain the concept of Spatial Data and all different techniques of loading and transforming XML from diverse format and systems. It shows so many examples at a very granular level. This book is a “must read” for everyone that has any interest on learning great powerful XML techniques on SQL Server 2008. It is definitely great!
A wonderfully concise book without the typically verbose pay-per-word variants the IT book market has too much of!
I’ll lend my copy to whichever customer needs to know the business value of SOA – AND whoever needs to realize NOW is the time to go ahead!
Rating: 5 / 5
Its a great buy for any Java SOA Developer. It very well starts with the xml concepts explaining schema and other details and then gets into the webservices concepts, finally diving into BPEL and ESB stuff.
It does not cover detailed concepts for BPEL and ESB but gives a very good brief explanation of the topics and headstart for a developer to dive into these topics. Overall its a good buy for a person who wants to start from webservices and then start understanding SOA Concepts as it covers both the restful and SOAP based services concepts.
Es injusto que alguien le pueda dar 1 estrella a este libro, porque es un texto muy bueno. Definitivamente está dirigido a un público diferente de aquellos que buscan cómo aprender algo en 10 minutos o 24 horas, no es ese tipo de literatura.
Si Ud. esta interesado en entender la filosofia de los ambientes distribuidos y el papel que XML y los Web Service juegan, este libro es para Ud.
Rating: 5 / 5
Author’s sarcastic tone of voice often mocks/belittles the ‘dumb reader’
“We will not describe this schema definition in great detail. By now, you should be familiar with schema constructs; if you need to review this material, please refer to Chapter 1.” pg. 375(ch 14)
“At this point you may be wondering ..how it knows what this message is requesting. From an intuitive standpoint, the answer to this question is that the…. pg 361
“If you examine the response message, again from an intuitive standpoint, you may notice the following points” pg 362
For example, xml schemas chapter is from page 108 to 164 about 60 pages, but realy useful w3c xml schema only take less 8 pages, others, useless, forget them.
Hi my dear author,
you have a lot of work to do, from simple to complex, how can you just give a long example and finish. Do you know “learning” means ***FOCUSING ON CORE***
Rating: 2 / 5
Like the other Nutshell books in O’Reilly’s series, this too is designed to provide the most valuable information in the least space possible. Some people criticize the Nutshell series over this issue, but it is really the strong point of this book-it is designed to be used as a desktop reference. I have always liked the Nutshell book, and this one is no exception.
Again, this book isn’t designed to be a how-to, and O’Reilly doesn’t claim it as such. It’s designed as a desktop reference, which is really where this book shines. Java web service developers will find this a valuable addition to their library.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is not only powerful, but is a must have for anyone developing against Exchange Server either now or in the future. The explanations are both thorough as well as detailed and make it easy for those who have never written web services to get started. The examples are fantastic and complete and in no time at all I was able to get started. I would recommend this book to anyone, new programmers or experienced. Fantastic book!
Rating: 5 / 5
The other review book I received yesterday was XML Pocket Reference (3rd Edition) by Simon St. Laurent and Michael Fitzgerald. Depending on what you’re looking for, this may or may not the book for you…
Contents: Introduction; XML Structures; Document Type Definitions; W3C XML Schema; RELAX NG; Schematron; XML Specifications; Index
Admittedly, trying to cover “XML” in a single book is a daunting task. XML is made up of so many standards and technologies (XPath, XForms, XML Schema, etc.) that you either have to specialize your coverage area or be ready to publish a *really* heavy book. To their credit, the authors stripped out XSLT into it’s own pocket guide. That act keeps this particular book small enough to fit in your pocket and that’s good. But if you’re wanting information on XSLT and think this might be your book, forget it.
Next, the XML Structures and Document Type Definition chapters seemed to be a little confusing. There was something introduced that I had never heard of before… something called “Productions” followed by syntax that looked like regular expression language. Never having seen that term before in my XML reading, I went back to the introduction to see what the authors wanted to convey there. The only explanation was “As each structure is discussed, applicable productions from the XML 1.0 and 1.1 specs will be listed in the order in which they appear in the specs.” So, I still really don’t know what productions are, and I probably have to go to the specs to find that out. The description of each section in an XML document, like CDATA or declarations, was nice though.
The book starts to become really useful when you get into the XML Schema section. There they go into each of the elements along with each attribute that can be used with the element. This is the type of reference information I’d expect to see in a pocket guide. Something I can turn to quickly as a refresher for what parameters or attributes I can use with an element, or to gain a quick understanding of an element I haven’t seen before. This same structure is followed for the RELAX NG and Schematron schema languages, so the book will be helpful if you live in those worlds also.
Basically, I found the XML Pocket Guide to be a little “hit and miss”. If the title had been “XML Schema Pocket Guide”, I’d have felt like the book was pretty on target. Trying to call it the XML Pocket Guide seems to infer there’s a lot more in here than there actually is, and a buyer might get a copy and be highly disappointed in what it doesn’t cover. If you’re looking for schema info, you’ll love the book. If that’s a secondary reason for you to get the book, you might be disappointed.
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve just read this book. I don’t like to write any review (my English is still poor) and i wasn’t goint to, but saw previous reviewer. That gay is from people who love a book such as “c++ for 10 minute”. This book is the most valuable for people who would like to know how to build distributed applications across inet boundaries, how to convert (forsee minimum changes at the begining of project) a desktop to a distributed application. The book makes you think, but not just cut-copy code. The examples are the most practicals I’ve ever seen. Actually they are patterns of real applications. There is only 7-th (SOAP) chapter where I fell (I couldn’t build example). The most important chapters are 8 (Web Services) and 16 (Windows Form), you will learn how to reuse code using combination user and custom controls, then transform desktop to a distributed application, after then deploy it without client administration, finally autors show you how to join . Net client with java servlets.
Rating: 5 / 5
In this book, Linthicum illustrates, for today’s enterprise users, a step-wise approach for managing the convergence of SOA and Cloud Computing. For businesses looking for recommendations for leveraging Cloud Computing, Linthicum provides an understanding of various functions provided by the Cloud and how to use SOA to design for incorporating them into their IT strategy.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought the book thinking that book’s title will actually be expanded further in the book. Nope. After reading first few chapters, I felt like I went back 15 years in technology. I would recommend to read other SOA books (one by Thomas Erl is good). Planning to return the book.
Rating: 1 / 5
‘Pro PHP XML and Web Services’ by Robert Richards is a great book to help you learn your way around these technologies. Packing in over 900+ pages, this book gives a broad overview of the subject matter which is outlined here:
01. Introduction to XML and Web Services
02. XML Structure
03. Validation
04. XPath, XPointer, XInclude
05. PHP and XML
06. Document Object Model
07. SimpleXML
08. Simple API for XML
09. XMLReader
10. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
11. Effective and Efficient Processing
12. XML Security
13. PEAR and XML
14. Content Syndication: RSS and Atom
15. Web Distributed Data Exchange
16. XML-RPC
17. Representational State Transfer
18. SOAP
19. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
20. PEAR and Web Services
21. Other XML Technologies and Extensions
If you need a book that dives into the XML technology and doesn’t look back, this is a nice pickup that gets the job done. Lots of other Apress books I feel are a bit too long, but this book at over 900 pages I have less complaints about. It’s solidly written and a nice companion book to have on your bookshelf for anyone that programs with XML.
Stupidly I thought that if a book made it to a 2nd edition it must be good . . . but alas not so. I should have read the reviews first. In the end I learned more from Wikipedia than this book =(
Rating: 1 / 5
Josuttis does an excellent job in transferring his vast experience with SOA architecture to the reader in ways that allow you to take your previous knowledge of enterprise software and (finally) understand SOA to the point where you can guide a team as to whats important and not important and where the pitfalls are.
There are some initial chapters that have some confusing points specifically around what an ESB is or is not and whether its needed in a SOA. To cut a long story short, Josuttis is being initially abstract about what an ESB is which is confusing when we have very specific examples in the marketplace. When he says you need an ESB to implement a SOA I was confused until he explained that you need specific functionality that you might implement in an application server (as many have successfully) or buy an EAI product or buy an ESB. After that it was plain sailing in terms of understanding what to think about architecturally.
This book is far more practical and accessible than the Thomas Erl books and articles that I’ve read which left me wanting less abstraction and more specifics. In addition he also covers the soft skills side (not just the technical side) which is critical when making stategic changes to IT systems.
To reiterate, clearly a lot of painful experience has been distilled here and you would be crazy not to read this book to get that injection of experience in your team.
This is a book that will build your confidence as an architect faced with SOA tasks.
Rating: 5 / 5
As with all O’Reilly books there’s a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don’t force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what’s available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray’s RPC::XML modules (he’s also one of the authors). I’ve been fighting with getting the ’system.*’ handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great book on SOA governance and the considerations to make when establishing this for your organization. Written from a pragmatic viewpoint. I found this to be well laid-out and an enjoyable read (as much as the topic of SOA Governance will allow, anyway). Happy to have this in my personal library. Recommended!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book should be titled: “Vendor Oriented Software.”
The one thing that most people agree upon with SOA is that there is a lot of confusion. This book unfortunately adds to that confusion.
The second thing that most people agree upon is that the vendors of SOA related software can not help themselves but define SOA as best suites what they are selling.
Unfortunately, the authors of this book look at SOA from the Vendors perspective, as opposed to defining SOA from the perspective of the those that are actually using it as an efficient and effective means of empowering their enterprise architecture.
Given that SOA tooling is on a strong march to commoditization via open source there advice is rendered all the more irrelevant as software vendors increasingly cannot compete with the free army or best practices being applied in open source software.
All that aside, if you are really interested in learning SOA and not VOA, here is my suggestion of what to read and the order to read it in:
- Vendor agnostic introduction to the concepts >> Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell
- Intermediate review of the fundamentals >> SOA in Practice by Nicolai M. Josuttis
- Intermediate do it yourself with Open Source >> SOA Using Java Web Services by Mark Hansen
- Advanced enterprise review of the issues >> Any of the SOA books by by Thomas Erl
- Deep dive for doing it yourself at the nuts and bolts level >> Building Web Services by Steve Graham et al
The book was in A+ condition, but the shipping was slow, no wonder though, since it was sendt to Norway from New Zealand. The book was thoroughly packed. The seller is highly recommended.
The book itself seems to just what i was looking for, alot of references
Rating: 5 / 5
When I start with XML, I don’t even know what that is, I have the basic knowledge of HTML, and a little bit about Basic, right now, I’m being able to write my own dynamic website by using XML. It is very understandable. It’s worth it to buy it.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is a very good book to start with web service. The explanation and examples provide most of needs to start with a web service project. It has sufficient details to use Sun tools. Readers can easily found most of their interests on this topic. The major drawback is the short of coverage on implementations of weblogic or websphere, which are of interests of most programmers. This is excellent book for starters or mid-level developers
Rating: 4 / 5
This particular book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of PHP development. I was pleased with the vast amount of topics covered. This book is a very useful tool for developers.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author points out that programmers will often leave the specifications behind after the first month and go off in a different direction … and he says this is *a good thing!* He encourages programmers and their managers to ignore documentation, as it just slows down the inherently creative programming process.
If an author wants to guarantee a positive response, there are few better ways than telling people their own laziest, worst instincts are actually the preferred model. Some of his points are so wildly off-base that it isn’t worth the time to decide if the rest of what he says is worthwhile.
Rating: 1 / 5
Unfortunately, this i the text book required for my college’s online XML course. This is the third Thompson Course Technology New Perspectives book I’ve had to purchase for a class, and it is by far the worst. I had no real problems with the “HTML and XHTML” or “Javascript” books. This XML book on the other hand offers poor explanations of concepts, and code examples that don’t always work. Some chapters mention concepts, barely explain them, and then require they be used as part of the case problems to end the chapter. If I wanted to learn XML by searching the internet I wouldn’t have purchased an $80 book. A mistake or two would be forgivable, but this book continually amazes me with how bad it is.
Rating: 1 / 5
I love this 300 pages book. Readers wrote a lot about this very good book. I hope that other books having 500+, or even 1000+ pages, please be broken down to 1+ volumns in order for max of 300 pages/each volumn. That would help protect books when used by reader from itself damaged by its heavy weight & too thick. Readers don’t have to take those “big guys” with them, rather than just the volumns that they need at that moment.
Rating: 5 / 5
The writing is very dry in this book though it has plenty of examples. I should have waited for the O’Reilly Java & XML book which is going to be published soon.
In addition, an annoyance is that this book talks about Eclipse only. If an IDE is going to be covered both Eclipse and Netbeans should be discussed. If you are not going to cover both, cover neither.
I have learned a few things from this book but it has room to grow before the next version.
Rating: 3 / 5
The info doesn’t do a very good job explaining bits of the code. They just give you a few pages of code at a time and then shows you what the end result looks like. I would have preferred it covering less topics and explaining them better. This book is good if you already have a high traffic site and want to add another feature. Amazon web services may not be the best place if you are wanting to make some income from selling their stuff. The book says it is better if you have something to sell through amazon web services. I also couldn’t get one example to work so I emailed the author but didn’t get any reply.
Rating: 4 / 5
Dont you get sick of books that are basically help files and online documentation with some window dressing?? Well this book avoids that totally….granted it does have some reference type material in it, but only to get you up to speed on relevant technologies.
I have heard of these guys before …and they are the real deal…they have the real world experience and this book shows it.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is titled ‘THE EXPERT VOICE IN JAVA TECHNOLOGY’. But this book is full of something like how to use eclipse(window pictures in many pages), which most of experienced programmers already know. It repeats this again and again. Another book ‘Java & XML ‘ is much better than this one.
Rating: 2 / 5
XML is everywhere today. Before reading this book I had a good understanding of XML but after finishing it I can say that I have a deep understanding of the subject. The book covers XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS, XSL-FO, different XML schemas, XSLT, XPath, XQuery in great detail using very comprehensive hand-on examples. It goes further on covering AJAX, XML and .NET, XML and JAVA. The books includes a very detailed explanation of SOAP, WSDL and Web Services. It also introduces Resource Description Framework and the Semantic Web.
This book is for anyone that wants to get a deep understanding of XML. It is not a light introduction. It is not a book for platform specific Web Services implementation (ex. WCF)
I recommend it for everyone who really wants to understand XML for professional use.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book added very little to my current understanding of SOA. In fact I am not really sure what it contributes to the design strategies of SOA, and it is kind of too late to introduce SOA in year 2008 -> about almost 8 years after its inception. To learn about SOA basics I suggeet to get the SOA for Dummies book that does a better job on explaining SOA. Also the chapters about SOA security and SOA governance are poor and again do not add to the current industry discussion of SOA. I do not recommend it to mid or expert level SOA persons. But even people that starting with SOA will find it poor to begin with. It is too late too little. I like the case studies in the end of the book and again I am not sure why these cases are for insurance companies. Is this book for the insurence industry only?
Rating: 1 / 5
I strongly recommend this book for senior IT management, SOA architects and anyone interested in how to make an SOA project a success. The principles read like they were directly from the SOA projects I’ve worked on in the past, what works and what doesn’t. The sections on IT organization in the beginning are the best I’ve ever seen. The service governance sections are also the best, essential for anyone developing design time governance standards. The service examples are an absolute must read for anyone desiring how to learn to define services and their granularity. I couldn’t have written much better myself
Overall, I commend the authors and IBM for providing such an invaluable book for the progressive IT organization – fail to read at the peril of not delivering ROI on your SOA projects, delivering on-time and within budget. I’ve sent recommendations to all involved.
Rating: 5 / 5
Amazon has done an amazing job of creating a very simple API, which Jason Levitt does an excellent job of explaining. Easy to read, easy to comprehend, now let’s see what kind of user interface you can build with this tool. And maybe, just maybe, someone will benefit from what you’ve built, buy something from Amazon, and you can share in the sale.
Rating: 5 / 5
Though I’ve only given this book a four star review, it’s solely because I haven’t finished it. The portion of the book I’ve read has been extremely informative and logically presented in an easily digestable format. Mr. Englander makes a habit of reiterating concepts periodically so that they stick with you by the time you’ve put the book down.
I work for a rather large dot com preparing to expose some product interfaces via SOAP…when all is successfully deployed, I’ll have Mr. Englander to thank…
Rating: 4 / 5
The Pro SQL Server 2008 XML book dives right into the details of XML from the first page. This book was written by a developer for developers, and the author goes to great lengths to demonstrate all the concepts presented in the book. In my opinion, this book scores highly in many areas.
The author assumes a basic knowledge of SQL, but he thoroughly explains every step of SQL Server’s XML functionality along the way. The book even compares and contrasts the SQL Server implementation of XML to the W3C and ISO standards, pointing out where the SQL Server implementation differs.
However, while the book assumes this basic understanding, any developer interested in getting the most out of SQL Server’s XML functions will find the book both informative and enjoyable. The author goes to great lengths to explain XML and why it’s relevant in the database. This is absolutely the best reference for SQL Server XML that I’ve seen.
The author provides what he calls “Cross-Platform Tips” at various points to call attention to limitations of the SQL Server implementation, or areas where it differs from the standards. These types of tips, generously portioned throughout the book, are designed to keep people from wasting hours trying to figure out why the XQuery code sample they copied from the Internet (or some other source) isn’t working as advertised on SQL Server. While this book is written for SQL Server 2008, much of the functionality described works with (or is similar to) SQL Server 2005 functionality (as the author points out, some notable exceptions include the added support for Geography Markup Language “GML”, and the FLWOR statement “let” clause). As the book explains, the difference between SQL Server 2005 XML functionality and SQL Server 2008 XML functionality is not nearly as large as the leap was from SQL 2000 to 2005. New SQL Server 2008 features aside, this book works equally well as a reference to SQL Server 2005 XML functionality!
Another thing I like about this book is that the author builds on the code samples from one chapter to the next. There is a particularly detailed example of a hierarchical “bill of materials” that the author continually adds newly introduced functionality to over the course of a few chapters. He uses this example to demonstrate how to layer XML functionality to build an intricate application from a very basic premise. I really like the fact that this book provides examples and addresses the problems that most books go out of their way to avoid. Where many books give you a simple top-down hierarchical organization chart that’s been done 100 times by 100 different people, this book gives you recursive XML Schemas. Instead of just rehashing the well-advertised SQL Server limitation that Document Type Definitions can’t be used to validate your XML this book gives you working examples of code to get around the issue. The book provides many more real world examples, with some pretty intriguing ideas as well (like grabbing an XML RSS feed or searching eBay directly from SQL Server). A nice bonus: Almost all examples are designed to run directly in the AdventureWorks 2008 sample database, and all are freely downloadable from the publisher’s website.
And this book doesn’t just stop at the server. The author provides analysis of client-side tools including LINQ to XML, SQLXML, HTTP SOAP Endpoints, and a wide supporting cast of XML support tools – many that are provided “out of the box” with SQL Server.
This is the ultimate reference for all things XML on SQL Server 2008.
At face value, this book looks comprehensive. However, it suffers from being so dull that it is impossible to stay awake for more than a few sentences. Typical example: “A web service is provided by a provider entity. A provider entity can be an individual or an organisation. A provider entity provides the web service through a provider agent”. If you are still awake – well done! This book was unusable for me.
Rating: 2 / 5
It gives us the best look in a glance of what XML is all about and teaches us great good things. A Tricki but very well acomplished book with great examples. A must Buy!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
I had the opportunity to meet the author while flying back home to Trinidad. We discussed usage of web services and how they could help with a project I am working on. He even convinced me to consider to offer a course at our university on the subject. He is knowledgable and I hope he will visit our country again.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this guide because I needed a quick lookup for XML schema elements (something you’d think would be readily available online, but isn’t – at least not in a usable form). The bulk of the book (70 of its 162 pages – about half) is dedicated to XSD, so I was very happy with what I got. The first 30 pages cover XML itself (all the nitpicking details like predefined entities, what characters are allowed in attribute names, etc). The next 17 pages cover DTD (which you may occasionally still need to know, even these days). The next 70 cover XML Schema, and the book finishes up with an additional 43 pages on Relax-NG and Schematron (two competing, and not very common, schema definition formats).
I agree with other reviewers that the book would have been complete without the Relax-NG and Schematron coverage, but it would have just been 43 pages shorter if that was the case – there’s really not much else they could have said about XML, DTD and XSD and still have been a concise “pocket reference”. This book is actually pretty thick for an O’Reilly pocket reference – I have four other pocket guides on my bookshelf right now, and the other three have 120, 124 and 66 pages each. By that standard, I figure the coverage of Relax-NG and Schematron were just a “buy one get one free” type of add-on, especially since this book costs the same as all the other pocket reference books.
This book is a perfect reference for somebody who needs a quick, handy reference to XML schema and the occasional XML rule.
Rating: 5 / 5
Although the seller’s description of the book as being in good shape was surely truthful, their use of an envelope, rather than a more rigid shipping container resulted in the softcover book sustaining cosmetic damage during shipping.
Rating: 2 / 5
I am involved in a project to determine the best practices for integrating web services into our applications. We purchased a handful of recommended books on the topic including this one. I have to say that I am disappointed in this book.
First off there is little coverage of web services from an architecture point of view. There are some decent chapters that introduce the concepts of web services and SOA and then the authors jump directly into reference mode on the dozen or so technologies that they think you must master to develop web services.
Maybe it is just a failure of the J2EE process, but this book does little to address the confusion and complexity involved with developing web services in Java. In fact this book just adds to the problem. Developers should not need to know all the details of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and all the JAX APIs in order to develop web services. For the most part, all this plumbing technology should be hidden from developers yet it is the focus of this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
When I was trying to pick a book to fill in the gaps (chasms) in my XML experience, I routed around in the amazon percentage, (what percent of people bought this book, what percent bought other books.) This one seemed to have a good go-to ratio, and on one of the other books, the review referred to this one. I bought it second hand and got an excellent price. I am pleased. It reads easily and has a useful index.
With that said, this 800+ page book includes:
XML Basics: Syntax, Editors, Other tools
Presentation: XHTML and CSS
XML-FO
Defining Structure: DTDs and Schemas (and Relax NG)
XML as Data: the template translator XSLT, XPath, and XQuery
XML in the Data Tier, relation to relational DBs
Programming XML: the XML Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML (SAX) ,and yes Ajax, XML and .Net, XML and Java, Python, Ruby, and Perl
XML Services: RSS and Atom, Web services
SOAP and WSDL:
Advanced Web services
more stuff including 30 pages of XML in Office Development.
I bought this book to have some knowledge of XML, but his book is so boring….This is my third week and I am in chapter 2, and believe me I am pushing myself to read it. I think I will buy another XML book or just go straight to a XHTML book. I understand that without theory you cannot explain anything, but this is too much…to much theory.
Rating: 3 / 5
When I first started reading the book, I thought it would be just another SOA book, with lots of fluff/propaganda and little solid material on SOA. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by the contents of the book. The book does provide a great overview of SOA and the associated distributing computing technologies such as sockets, RPC, distributed objects, and messaging but, in addition, it provides code examples for each of SOA-based integration patterns, which makes it extremely useful book for practictioning IT professional such as IT Architects and developers.
Furthermore, a very appealing aspects of this book is that it provides a complete description of the SOA and SOA-based integration patterns by addressing gaps in these areas which exists in the current literature. Thus, in addition to describing web services and how to develop them, it contains detailed chapters on the enterprise service bus and integration of mainframe based applications. I especially liked the chapter on the Enterprise Service Bus – I have not found such a comprehensive treatment of the Enterprise Service Bus in any other book on SOA.
In the end, I have learned a great deal from reading this book and I highly recommend this book to any IT professional who is interested in the subject of SOA and Enterprise integration. The book would serve as a great reference for IT architects, senior developers, and IT managers.
Rating: 5 / 5
A good reference book for Java Web Services. It had most of what I was looking for. Lacked depth and samples but the nutshell series was always meant to be more a reference than a tutorial.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book discusses technologies that a Java/JEE developer would use on a regular basis. It keeps it real by providing sample code and discussing the concepts at a technical level unlike other books that bombard you with buzzwords and jargon.
I keep the included sample projects mounted in Eclipse all the time. I found myself copying and pasting from these samples into my own programs. I do this not only for APIs that I am learning but also with APIs that I am pretty familiar with. I do this to save time as I won’t have to lookup javadoc or other internet resources.
I have worked as a J2EE Architect and am now working as a Web Services Architect. As part of my job I frequently develop documentation on concepts discussed in this book for providing guidance to my developers. Now all I do is, I give them this book and refer them to a relevant chapters.
In short this is the only book I need for all my XML development needs. A must have in any Java/JEE developer’s bookshelf.
Rating: 5 / 5
An earlier post provided a link to Wiley that now appears to be outdated. However, I did find the new link on their website. I have not used this product and had to rate it to provide feedback. So, I gave it a neutral so as not so skew the reviews.
Too much verbose, disconnected concepts and the writing style is hard to follow – like too many cooks spoil the broth. The book did well to introduce the basics of SOA but failed to connect the dots in terms of practical approaches with patterns and best practices. The content in Part 2 of this book sound a vendor specific material and couple of chapters are just showing less short than a hello world case study.
Rating: 2 / 5
Amazon deleted my last negative review so I’m writing another one. This book is nothing but middle manager buzzwards and little content. Beware all the 5 star ‘real name’ reviews below. Someone is stacking the deck on this one.
I was surprised to see good reviews of this book. There seems to be an audience that finds this book useful, but it’s not clear to me why.
This book lacks any analysis or useful conceptual insight. The author also seems to have spent little or no effort in attempting to organise the material. It’s simply a bottom-up, blow-by-blow account of walking through the steps of developing trivial applications using the Apache and GLUE SOAP servers. Most people would be far better off reading the documentation for the SOAP platfrom they want to use.
From my point of view, this book borders on fraud. It’s clear from this book that Oreilly have really dropped their game.
Rating: 2 / 5
The book was new as described and I received it very quickly. I would suggest using a carboard box or wrapping instead of the flat rate evelopes as USPS kind of mistreated it. The mail man tried rolling the book and tried fitting it into my tiny apartment mailbox.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book starts with the basics of XML and builds right through how to build and deploy enterprise applications using Web Services and .NET. A great book for anyone looking to add professional .NET development experience to their resume.
Rating: 5 / 5
I wrote on earlier version of this book, “An ESB is in the core of most enterprise SOA implementations and AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) is one of the leading ESB. This book covers all the features expected from a modern ESB using realistic use cases and samples that run on ALSB. Once you downloaded the samples you will have a library of solutions that may be applied to your own projects or may be used to explore ALSB features. In addition the book covers the service design, specially the design of composite and orchestrated services deployed on the bus. Although the book is written particularly for ALSB, the topics covered in it will give you very good idea on any modern ESB. I found this book very useful for my projects; applied many of the solutions included in this book. I recommend it for new beginners as well as experienced service developers, SOA architects, and managers overseeing SOA projects.”
What I described above is even more relevant with the new version. It is also clear that (ALSB then) now Oracle Service Bus (OSB) evolved to include several new features that alone makes this book a valuable reference. In addition, the content is solidified with field experience, feedback and expanded with wealth of information based on experience of the additional new experts/authors including security, new development environment, and new sections such as custom transport development, using Java and EJBs and more… Again, this book will give you a solid background on ESB in general, but if you have or planning to build on an Oracle SOA platform this book is introducing and describing the core of it, is a must!
Rating: 5 / 5
Quite some time ago, Apress sent me Pro XML and Web Services to review, and I am just now getting around to it. First off, let me say that this book is huge. It weighs in at 936 pages, and the one I have is a hard-cover. Rob Richards has done an amazing job at providing an incredibly comprehensive volume, covering a vast amount of information.
Anything I write in this review will probably not do the book full justice, simply because it is so extensive. That being said, I will attempt to briefly summarize its contents, so you will have an idea of just how much is covered. Here is a listing of topics by each of the 21 chapters:
1. Introduction to XML and Web Services
2. XML Structure
3. Validation
4. XPath, XPointer, XInclude, and the Future
5. PHP and XML
6. Document Object Model (DOM)
7. SimpleXML
8. Simple API for XML (SAX)
9. XMLReader
10. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
11. Effective and Efficient Processing
12. XML Security
13. PEAR and XML
14. Content Syndication: RSS and Atom
15. Web Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX)
16. XML-RPC
17. Representational State Transfer (REST)
18. SOAP
19. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
20. PEAR and Web Services
21. Other XML Technologies and Extensions
Appendices:
1. XML Schema Built-In Data Types Reference
2. Extension APIs
3. Features and Changes in PHP 6
As you can see, there is quite a bit to be learned from this veritable tome of knowledge. There is even a sneak peek of what is around the corner for the future version of PHP 6. Since I can’t really go over it all (well I could, but won’t), allow me to point out some of the things I enjoyed about this book.
If you have worked with well-formed XHTML files at all, you no doubt are familiar with this bit of code, usually at the top of every document…
[...]
If you were to navigate to that *.dtd file, you would see a Document Type Definition for Extensible HTML 1.0. In fact, why don’t you just go ahead and check it out. If you get a browser prompt, just open it in your favorite code editor. All of that information is what XHTML 1.0 Strict is validated against. XHTML, being a rewrite / facelift of HTML in XML, adheres to the W3C concept of Namespaces in XML. XHTML 1.1 also has a DTD, as does HTML 4.01, etc.
Hopefully it comes no surprise that you’ve been working with XML concepts for some time now, perhaps unknowingly. Richards helps demystify these concepts, and shows how to write your own custom Document Type Definitions. After all, that is the key tenet of XML – Extensibility. As long as things are properly self closing, there is a whole lot of flexilibility available. I liked his example of < sarcasm >…< /sarcasm > in one of the opening chapters.
After the chapters on XML, he moves to talking about the Document Object Model or DOM for short. You’ve no doubt heard this term before, probably in conjunction with JavaScript. DOM though, is language neutral or multi-lingual you could say. Just as JavaScript can be used to manipulate the DOM on the client-side, PHP can be used on the server-side to parse an XML document. That is of course the fundamental aspect of AJAX – shared information via XML between JS and a server-side language. In the case of this book, it’s PHP.
In chapter 20 on PEAR and Web Services, he gets into how to use the services offered by Amazon, Del.icio.us, Ebay, Google, Techorati, Weather.com and Yahoo. In chapter 21, he touches briefly on Ajax. He does so from the standpoint that because it is becoming so prevalent, a PHP developer may need to know at least how it will interface with one’s server-side code.
Also in the last chapter, he covers some things to think about when designing PHP driven sites to be served up on mobile devices. You could think of the wireless realm like the old West. The dust is still settling, and no real consensus has been reached as of yet. Some people swear by Wireless Markup Language, being pioneered by the Open Mobile Alliance, whereas others stick by the W3C recommendation to use XHTML Basic. It should be noted that the OMA and W3C are not at odds. WML is in fact written in XML.
Well, I will wrap this up. Hopefully I was not too brief in highlighting what I thought was cool. Really, the whole book is very good, but to write a paragraph about every chapter would make for a really lengthy review. I would highly recommend this as a resource for any developers who want to really dig in and solidify their working knowledge of PHP and web services, or just want to explore the nuances and complexities of XML DTD’s and namespaces.
Rating: 5 / 5
Well.. I have pre-ordered that book back in Feb and was very anxious to get it. I read it cover to cover and could not find any how-tos, migration paths, implementation ideas, etc.. AWS is a new concept so many IT Directors and sysasdmins who have previously deployed “three tier” structure (DB – MiddleLayer – Web server) are desperate to find how to migrate your typical “data center” / “managed service” / “colocation” into Amazon web cloud (EC2 /S3)- besides lots of Ruby examples that book has little to offer: no structure, no migration. Bottom line: if you want to start fresh and “play” with AWS -this one is for you, if you manage 4 or 5 or 20 data centers and concern about how many servers do you really need and how to move your high availability application to Amazon – you need to look elsewhere.
Rating: 2 / 5
I think this book is great, first time I have seen it advertized I thought: “I have to get this”. Have not finished reading it yet, I am about one third through, but I think one of the big flaws (if not indeed the author meant it that way) is that it dives into XML / WSDL / SOAP too soon or too sudden… at least for me. By the time I have started understanting how everything is organized in the scheme of things, it was all about that, and I personally don’t have experience — a lot with these things.
Another thing I don’t particularly enjoy is the presentation is intertwined — PHP 4 and PHP 5. At times this is confusing and if you just browse trough trying to find something randomly, you always have to read back a little bit to find out whether it’s about PHP 4 or 5.
Otherwise, I am pretty happy with it and can’t wait to actually start implementing some things I heave learned in this book in my own applications.
Rating: 4 / 5
I found this book gave a good overview of JAX-RPC and JWSDK features. But this book is very specific to the Sun JWSDK implementation. There is nothing on Apache AXIS or differences between implementations. The biggest deficiency for me was that there is nothing at all on DIME and it only dicusses the non-standard Sun JWSDK SOAP with MIME attachments API without mentioning any alternatives.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have very much enjoyed using this book. It is written in easy to understand language, but it is certainly not dumbed down either.
I found the example code used to be extremely succinct. This contrasts sharply with many other technical books that use either numerous code examples where more explanation would better serve the reader or not enough examples to illustrate a point.
The information covered is also quite comprehensive, covering everything from the very basics of XML structure and usage up to advanced XML used in RSS, WDDX, XML-RPC, and defining web services using SOAP. This book includes everything you’ll need to know to integrate with many current web services or build your own.
Rating: 5 / 5
Picked up a copy of this book from the library, and was very disappointed.
It is full of stupid jokes, the table of contents is mostly useless because of the childish and uninformative chapter/section titles.
More than 50% of the book is useless fluff like “OK so you really want to know what service oriented architecture is? That’s good, hold on, it won’t be too hard — you’ll understand all of this later. Don’t be scared off by these very technical terms — we’ll get through it….” — PAGE AFTER PAGE of it. You will (literally) learn more from the Wikipedia article on SOA than you will from this entire book.
If you want a good book on the subject, get “SOA in Practice” by Nicolai Josuttis instead — it is much clearer, more interesting, and in-depth.
Do not waste your money on this book — get it from a library or a dumpster.
Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book with lot of hopes, all I got is a JUNK. This book is nothing but a copy of specs obtained from OACIS and W3C. If you think about on implementing a WORKING Web services architecture using Java or .NET, then all you find is ZERO content. There is no working real-world architecture or implementation example discussed in this book. All the chapters are disconnected.
Everybody or most of everybody that are in web design in some form or another have heard about XML or even used it a bit. But personally I feel there are a small amount of resources out there that really teach you how to use XML in “real-world” scenarios. It’s nice to know what it is and know that many applications use it behind the scenes, but it still doesn’t help people understand how to use it for our own web applications.
This book solves that problem wonderfully by first showing you first what XML is and how to format proper XML documents. Then the author discusses how to publish XML documents in a couple web site examples (web catalog for one) and showing how to style these documents using regular CSS and XSLT, schemas as well as other technologies such as XPath and XQuery.
Each chapter presents a new problem (rendering XML to print, searching and merging documents, integrating web services, RSS feeds) and goes through step by step in how to work it out with really nice code examples. You really don’t need to read this book end to end to get the most out of it. Just pick a chapter and read through it since the author re-summarizes what was previously covered to bring you up to speed.
So for example, if you have XML documents that you need to integrate into a database (DB2, SQL Server, etc) or want to learn how to create XML documents from a database table(s) it first shows the necessary SQL to pull the data you need, then how to use various tools to create your format.
The book does use one program (Stylus Studio 2006) in particular but the author mentions other open-source programs that you can use as well (in Appendix too). A great little book (under 300 pages) that shows you some great uses for XML as well as teaching you how and why you should use it.
I bought this book with the intentions that it would give me examples clear and crisp about Master Data Management. But each time I read a chapter, it was lacking the information that I was looking for.This book takes a point and talks about it for pages and pages together. Sometimes, this book put me to sleep. Maybe it is just me , all the reviews that I read were so positive about this book.
This is one of the most complete books on web services published to date. The authors have done a great job of writing about both architectural and development issues surrounding web services.
Rating: 5 / 5
As with all O’Reilly books there’s a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don’t force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what’s available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray’s RPC::XML modules (he’s also one of the authors). I’ve been fighting with getting the ’system.*’ handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a very good launch pad for embarking on a SOA infrastructure within an Enterprise. While the examples and anecdotes are specific to the Oracle Service Bus product, the concepts are universally applicable to any ESB, and SOA strategy. I particularly liked chapter #7, Asynchronous Messaging, for providing useful patterns in decoupling message consumers from message producers, and chapter 9, Advanced Messaging Topics, describing how to constrain my service consumers with “Service Throttling”. With plenty of examples, and step-by-step instructions, this book provides a good tutorial for first-time OSB users, and a reliable reference for more seasoned ALSB/OSB professionals.
Rating: 4 / 5
The web is a marvelous way to exchange information. But it is very visually oriented. You browse to a site and read what you find. Alternatively you can download a filek, but this file is dependent on what the originator thinks you need.
XML is of course the answer. XML allows the sender and receiver of information to use the existing packet switching web communication channels and the existing servers to handle the transmission of data between machines.
XML is the core structure of a group of messaging commands. This combines with the SOAP protocol to define how messages are to be formatted using XML formats. Combining XML with SOAP and other standards results in the general concept of Web Services.
This book discusses the complete set of standards that make up web services. It is a reference format book, not a tutorial. It is, as the title says, on the architecture and specifications.
Good book for someone new to html, xslt, xml and the like. You get a good background of the evolution of the webspace languages as you are learning, and lots of little self-tests and pretty good examples. I had trouble with the CD-Rom, the Turbo XML included either no longer supported the beta copy or I missed something in the installation, in any case I never bothered with it any more. I was mostly just using it to gain an overall understanding of XML before I started studying XSLT. For that it was sufficient. I didn’t really do many of the examples, but they seemed well developed and had a logical flow.
The part I had a little problem with, but only a little, was when it came to writing code that would access outside data, especially tables and databases, and a bit with how the sorting worked. Probably had I done some hands on work it would’ve clarified it, but I was a bit lazy for that. In any case, overall it takes a simple language and doesn’t make it needlessly complicated, and the style is light and breezy without being flippant. You probably could knock it out in a weekend.
Rating: 4 / 5
Looks like other reviewers have beaten this book up on other aspects, so I’m not going to repeat what they say.
Another important fact that this book misses is that the Python language has the most flexible and “make sense” implementation of SOAP library.
I have dealt with SOAP since mid-last year when we need to find a technology that will bridge COM and Java world that performs acceptably. The choice fell on SOAP. Since our system is Java-based, we need to use Java SOAP.
The interesting point is that it took us just 2 weeks to come up with a Python prototype program which we continuously use to measure up the Java SOAP implementation which ends up taking us months to complete.
This shows just how up-to-date the Python community is in keeping up with new technologies (those that have potentials).
So why Python is not included in the selection of the language in this book is beyond me.
NOTE: For readers who ask “Python-what??”: Python is a typeless language that is more readable than Visual Basic but as versatile as Perl.
Rating: 2 / 5
I almost purchased this book as we’ve been using Amazon AWS more and more. Aside from lacking perl and PHP examples, what concerned me the most is that forms are used as examples in Amazon.com’s text. Forms that include information for which google indexes, and forms that use hidden fields (which are not so hidden) to pass information which hackers can also use. In today’s age of cyber warfare, I don’t recommend any method which includes plain text key information.
Rating: 1 / 5
The majority of the new material in this book is on different schema specifications. Schema, Relax NG and Schematron are covered. A handy book to have around when you are hacking XML. The online free documentation is not as handy as the content as it’s organized in this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book clearly explains the concepts and principles of SOA and makes the vital link to Enterprise Architecture. I would highly recommend this book to start with. If you then need more detail on for instance SOA Design Principles or SOA Design Patterns read Thomas Erl’s series.
Rating: 5 / 5
Copre le varie API disponibili per JAVA per gestire file XML: SAX, DOM, JAXP, StAX, JDOM, dom4j. Inoltre vengono trattati anche alcuni argomenti avanzati, utili per apprendere al meglio l’uso di queste API.
Il libro e’ colmo di codice ed e’ proprio il codice ad essere utilizzato come strumento didattico. Codice e diagrammi UML riempiono tutte le pagine.
E’ un libro molto pratico, rivolto ai programmatori. E’ necessario avere una piccola infarinatura riguardo l’XML: viene trattato brevemente nei primi capitoli.
E’ consigliato a chi ama libri con un approccio pragmatico.
I’m almost finished with this book, but have yet to determine what its purpose is. There is a lot of code about a lot of APIs, but it is not clear how one should approach Java & XML using this book. I think this book was a product of O’Reilly’s “Rough Cuts” program, and it is true the book is very roughly written and all the good stuff got cut. Maybe all the material which would make this a good book is on the website.
I must admit I’m very disappointed with O’Reilly as of late. Their books are going down hill rapidly, and I find I’m looking at other publishers (APress) much more often. I used to go to O’Reilly’s website almost daily to see what is coming out next, but now I’m considering removing the Ora bookmark from my browser because of lack of use and to create space for other URLs.
I really wish O’Reilly would get their act together and start publishing some well written and well edited books again.
Rating: 1 / 5
This books is great for anyone trying to learn XML. I am currently in a class that is web only. So with no in class instructions the book is even more key. This book is written step by step explaining why you are doing what they are instructing. A varitable cookbook for XML. As opposed to the Java class I took over the summer. The instructor could not have picked a more poorly written book. Some people know there stuff and others can actually put it into words that the novice can understand and relate. This is the sign of a true teacher. Carey is able to do this. I have had other classes with his books and they have great as well. The other benefit is that this books was much cheaper through Amazon than the bookstore. I would highly recommend this book.
It is a good book on SOA and covers numerous topics related to the subject. Especially for those who are getting into application integration technologies, it would be very helpful. The size of the book is just appropriate, not too long, not too short.
Rating: 4 / 5
Web services, the new way of stitching data and processing resources together to form elaborate, distributed applications, aren’t like other software systems. They differ even from other architectures for distributed applications. This book is better than any other book out there in helping readers come to grips with the terms, technologies, behaviors, and design requirements that define the Web services universe.
For an architect or manager who has the responsibility of planning the future EAI strategic direction for the company this book provides an honest basis to make well informed decisions e.g. does one move towards ebXML now or wait, or choose SOAP, WSDL, UDDI as they appear to be heading.
No book can be all things to all people and where the authors have thought appropriate they have referred the reader to further reading. I recommend this book for all Republicans in California.
Rating: 5 / 5
Excellent resource, but a bit droll. The content is laid out well, there are plenty of (working) examples, and there’s pretty much no fluff to the book at all (in contrast to many O’Reilly books which add a fair amount of humor and distraction).
My chief worry when I received the book was that the title on the spine said “Programming Amazon Web Servcies [sic]“. Yes, really the spine has a typo! The cover page does *not* have the typo. Obviously I was worried that the content might have similar brazen errors. But so far not so.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who needs an EC2/S3/AWS reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
One of the most comperhensive book about SOA, but the auther made it simple by providing easy to understand, step by step technique. As a .NET developer I founded it very interesting to learn about all the different methods of system integration. The use of diagrams through out the book make it easier to understand the concept.Over all, I loved it and highly recommend it
It’s OK… it’s nothing informative. I’d recommend buying some of the books that thoroughly cover SOAP and books that thoroughly cover Java + Web Services. This is nice and all but it just doesn’t pack a meaningful punch.
Rating: 3 / 5
One of the best books on the subject I’ve encountered in the last thirteen years of working with the internet. The tutorials are excellent – in that they appeared to be well debugged prior to publication. They do an excellent job in preparing a student for any of the four cases found at the end of each section. The only weakness encountered was that there was no comprehensive reference table of tags and associated attributes.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you are just getting into XML, this book is an excellent starter for bringing you up to speed. There have been some updates since this release but that’s just the way of technology, but you should definitely buy this book and keep it on your bookshelf.
Rating: 5 / 5
I work with a lot of school leavers and people outside IT and often have to advise them on how to empower themselves in IT in the right way. Surely SQL and databases are one of the first topics people should understand. HTML was also high on the list. With this book, the author has combined all of them in one making it a very relevant combination for today’s beginner. I will recommend this book to school leavers, financial people and people outside IT wanting to empower themselves quickly. Another great advantage of XML and databases is the platform independence. Very well done to the author for combining these topics at the entry level in such an easiliy understandable way!
Rating: 5 / 5
This was the first book I read on .NET and I have to say I am not happy with it. While there is certainly a lot of very good material in it, overall I wish I had looked elsewhere.
My goal in picking up my first .NET book was to find out what this new framework from Microsoft was all about, which directions it would take us in, and how I could best profit from it. Months after reading this book I can now safely say that it accomplished few if any of these goals.
What I got instead was a mass of loosely connected and highly technical data, almost like a bunch of pages that fell out of a documentation manual. These boring technicalities do not belong in a general .NET book. Most people will use it as an introduction to the framework, not as a reference.
For example, nowhere in this book did I read the fact that Microsoft intends to promote its framework primarily on the server side at first. Consumer applications will have a much harder time using .NET, presumably until Microsoft makes a client-side push with version 2 of the framework. This is the sort of important information that you can’t get from Microsoft’s promotional material. I was hoping to therefore learn it from this book, but I learned about the structure of COFF headers instead.
I read the 1st edition of this book, so it is possible that authors had little more than technical documentation to work with. Maybe the 2nd edition is more to my liking. But I doubt that it’s much better, because that would warrant a complete structural change of the book.
Rating: 2 / 5
DYNAMIC SOA AND BPM: BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND SOA AGILITY tells how to integrate SOA and BPM for maximum business flexibility and comes from an IBM SOA architect who offers a step-by-step tutorial on combining the two. From moving from simplified integration to a dynamic process to planning for services and providing an integration layer, this is a key pick for any technical computer business library.
Rating: 5 / 5
Very Nice Blog, Good work!
SOA Governance
The book talks about BPEL in a way expecting that your a BPEL GURU, I brought this book to learn BPEL, not to hear how other people used it.
Rating: 1 / 5
I got what was promised. Product quality is better than I expected and it was delivery quickly. A trustworthy seller.
Rating: 5 / 5
There have been an entire bowl of alphabet soup regarding various kinds of distributed processing systems. All of them, in their time, achieved a certain level of usage. None of them has done much to change the basic way we do business communications. That may be changing.
The development of the internet from a little system to exchange technical papers to a worldwide set of sites, all speaking internet protocol, have generated the expansion of broadband services all across the world from New York City to small towns in the third world. The basic ability of an individual to seek information has subsequently been expanded with XML so that information can be exchanged between computers of different types with different operating systems easily and without having to understand the characteristics of the computer at the other end. XML is a very open standard and it has some weaknesses. Enter BPEL to establish a set of standards, some common ways of doing things, and a generally more organized approach.
BPEL servers have been developed by, and there are URLs to: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun and at least four open-source implementations.
While this is a beginners book in so far as BPEL is concerned, it is presumed that the reader has some experience with XML, web services, and some kind of web services developent system such as J2EE or .NET.
Rating: 5 / 5
A brief background on my credentials – I’m with Interway , a company that provides software products to companies to help with their SOA needs (among other things).
Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL (http://interway.sk/en/technologies/service-oriented-architecture-soa/resource-center/business-process-driven-soa-using-bpmn-bpel.html) is about BPMN and BPEL in business processes. While BPMN (Business process modeling notation) is graphical language to describe business processes dedicated to business analysts, BPEL (Business process execution Language) is used for IT implementation of business processes.
Author of book Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL” – Matjaz B. Juric a Kapil Pant has a lot of experiences with business processes and technologies related to service oriented architecture (SOA).
Book is not primarily assigned to IT specialists, even it describes IT implementation process too and it doesn’t go deep into technical details. The mission is to demonstrate to the business managers and analysts main characteristic of SOA, that SOA has to be “Bussines-Driven”. Such a goal of service orientation can be achieved by easy transferring the business model created by BPMN into implementation by BPEL. Showing the importance of BPMN in service computing is the focus of this book. Business processes are in center sight of book which are essential for each company.
BPMN and BPEL are ways and means to help for creating effective business processes. Book involves whole lifecycle of business process starting from analysis and design to implementation, testing and management. For each part of lifecycle there are described SOA components (BPEL, services, ESB, business rules, BAM) which help to improve business process.
Authors choose Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite (BPA) as a modeling tool to model processes using BPMN. BPA tool helps to reach optimal analysis, results and predictions of processes using simulation. Oracle BPA Suite in collaboration with other Oracle products like SOA Suite, BPEL Process Manager and BAM can easy bridge analysis of processes with their implementation.
There are few pages showing ways of process modeling using BPMN in Oracle Business Process Architect. Properties settings of BPMN components like sub-processes, events and cycles and instances are described in more detailed. Authors write in detail about settings parameters of simulation and results evaluation.
Transition from BPMN model created by business analysts to BPEL process is not possible without filling up important technical information. Thanks to good integration Oracle BPA Suite with Oracle SOA Suite we can use extensions to add this information directly into BPMN model.
Authors describe properties of most important extensions like Automated Activity (it can be invoking of partner’s services or receiving information supplied by partner’s services), Human Workflow Activity (tasks performed by humans), Notification Activity (sending messages by email, fax, telephone or SMS) a Business Rules Activity (rules).
At the end there is example to demonstrate whole life cycle of business process. Implementation BPMN model starts from his design and simulation, then it leads to deploy as BPEL and to monitor by BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). There is described possibility of synchronization changes in BPEL process with BPMN model using blueprint of process which stays in the middle between BPEL development environment (JDeveloper) and BPA.
You can’t expect instructions for solution of particular problems although there are some patterns and rules for process modeling.
Authors explain why BPMN and SOA is the best solution for business processes and straightaway describe what is it BPMN and SOA. Chapters are supplemented by adequate comprehensible screenshots and diagrams.
The result idea of this book is that “role of IT technologies should be more complex than just executing automation of business tasks, it should be Business-Driven”.
Rating: 4 / 5
I wish this book was release a few months before as it would have saved me a lot of time and effort, with its real life examples for BPEL process implementations its a great book to have for anyone who is a new or regular user of OraBPEL.
It is an excellent book for someone new to the Oracle BPEL as well as gives excellent tips/ideas to experienced users in areas of :
- Managing an Oracle BPEL Production environment
- Using BRE rules engine for rule segregation
- Building Dynamic BPEL processes
- and Enriching the workflow applications.
I would have also liked to see some usage tips for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and BPEL integration to real time application reporting through BAM.
Overall a comprehensive BPEL book with great amount of experience “cooked” into it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Book was practically new just like it was stated, and it didn’t take more than 2 weeks to come which was PERFECT! There was almost no difference between this book and the new books =]
Rating: 5 / 5
Aimed squarely at developers, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) gives you everything you need to get started developing applications that uses the AWS (everything, that is, except the developer’s token which you can generate from the link on the product page).
A good understanding of Web Services is expected of the reader. If most of the terms XML, XML/HTTP, SOAP, XSLT, XML Schema, DTD, and WSDL leave you puzzled, then you need to read up on this topic first.
Most people downloading this kit will be web developers intending to use the services on their web sites, but the AWS kit is useful for all applications, including stand-alone applications and desktop integrations (e.g. you could integrate it with Microsoft Word to complete and maintain a bibliography for your thesis).
You should have familiarity with whatever development environment you choose. The kit contains examples in Java and perl, and has sample requests and responses, both for SOAP and XML/HTTP. However, most development environments, including Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, are full supported through SOAP and WSDL.
There are also examples on how to use the XSLT service, which is probably the easiest way for many to get started with the AWS.
The kit contains documentation in Microsoft Word and HTML formats. The documentation is somewhat terse, and describes the format of the calls to the Web Services. However, it omits any detailed description of the returned data structures and values, and it misses many useful functions (for example how to add multiple items to the Amazon shopping cart).
In summary, this kit will enable you to develop both traditional applications and web sites that use the Amazon Web Services. However, the documentation is terse and has a number of omissions, and some of the examples (e.g. perl) contains broken code, so realistically you’d want to participate in the developer forum (full instructions are in the kit and on the Amazon web site). The forum is friendly and active; it contains many examples of how to use AWS in a multitude of development languages and on a wide variety of platforms, and has a user-contributed Frequently Asked Questions list.
Good effort by Amazon and I appreciate the need to get the documentation out in a reasonable time, but for the next release we hope for more complete documentation, working examples, and examples for more languages. Three stars.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book, a collection of real world BPEL patterns is a must for any budding or experienced BPEL developer. My company are a software development company specialising in SOA solutions. We have deployed a number for successful SOA projects with BPEL, running on the Oracle BPEL engine, being the cornerstone technology on these projects. This book, along with associated tutorials, has been a key factor in achieving this success – giving us a headstart for some of the key patterns you will need in any BPEL project. It has saved us many days in our R&D lab by pointing us to the code we require for standard tasks required in our BPEL process – these patterns are an excellent addition to any BPEL teams developer standards and guidelines. The book is intuitive to follow, leading the developer you through cases with workable examples that you can build and deploy in your own environment.
All of the patterns in the book form a useful library of common BPEL scenarios. The pattern related to Dynamic Partner Links gave our development team a great hand in designing BPEL projects for production – on certain projects we use this extensively to give deployment options that are not suited to a web service directory.
The chapter on maintenance and management was invaluable for our Application Administrators. It is always easy to get a Proof of Concept BPEL process working in a lab environment, it is the issues faced when rolling this out across an enterprise that cause often time consuming resolution. This chapter gives many tips and leads you to understand the dehydration store for BPEL instances – a very good start point to build up reference documentation for any Application Administrator who intends to manage BPEL in a live environment.
Chapters on Business Rules (a technology that I feel is essential within SOA and within any BPEL solution) and on Reliable Processing give excellent introduction to the topics a developer will need to understand to build production standard BPEL.
The chapters on Rich Application UI and Building BPEL proc on the fly raises interesting ideas that have certainly triggered design innovations in our team. The WSIF chapter is very useful as a reference and includes many examples of techniques for what you will need within your toolkit.
Altogether an excellent addition to any developers bookshelf, but of particular necessity to anyone intending to use Oracle SOA tools to develop applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many of our clients are migrating from traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to the standard based SOA. This book has ten real-world case studies, which helped me to architect the solutions. Sometimes I use this book as best practices of Oracle BPEL-PM .
I like this book because the approach is more real-life examples than theory. Developers with minimum experience in SOA world will be able to leverage this emerging technology very easily.
Even though this book is useful for anybody to understand SOA and BPEL, this is extra useful for the people who are using Oracle Fusion Middleware (BPEL Process Manager).
Rating: 5 / 5
Author has so much grip and clarity on the subject that he makes it so simple and clear to read.
Rating: 5 / 5
An excellent book for beginners and for those who want to get familiar with advanced BPEL features. First chapter is a little weak but chapters two and three are great. This book is also a must for everybody working with Oracle BPEL Process Manager (chapter four). The examples are great. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
The BPEL Cookbook is an excellent practical guide to real-world SOA integration issues. It is not a “Learn BPEL” book, but rather the next step once you learn how to develop in BPEL. It addresses various types of issues that one needs to consider when developing BPEL processes. Chapter 3, “Building the Service Value Chain”, addresses the core of building a SOA architecture that the business process must be standardized and documented. While a couple of chapters are Oracle BPEL centric, the rest of the chapters address generic issues of any BPEL implementation. In particular, Reliable Messaging, Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF), building dynamic BPEL processes, and centralizing logging and error handling. For those using Oracle BPEL, chapter 5 shows how to use the Worklist API to build a rich Internet application. And chapter 2 shows how to integrate PeopleSoft CRM with Oracle eBusiness Suite.
Rating: 5 / 5
Martin Kalin’s Java Web Services Up And Running example-driven book offers an introduction to Java’s APIs for XMP Web Services and RESTful Web Services alike, and is a pick for any collection appealing to Java programmers. From working code examples and clear directions for deploying and creating an application to writing web services from scratch and handling authentication, Java Web Services Up And Running is a pick for any student of Java programming.
Rating: 5 / 5
The entire book can be summed up on 3 to 4 pages. Mostly the book regurgitates the same concepts over and over to fill up the pages, using a plethora of technical terminology to abstract it’s own meaningless. For the most part the book is intended to give you an overview of verity of technologies encapsulated in SOA architecture, but from a very distant perspective.
Rating: 2 / 5
Since the topic of this book is BPEL you might be surprised to find the question “Have you heard of business process execution language, or BPEL?” more than a third of the way through it, on page 68. But there’s an explanation: the book consists of one hundred short (usually one page) essays. Each essay is self-contained; they don’t build on each other. Page 68 is just the beginning of one of these one hundred essays. Reading this book is like reading the first page of one hundred different BPEL books.
To be fair, the book isn’t totally repetitive. One of the essays (page 73) is about “broadband over power lines”, or BPL. This essay was apparently included because the letters in “BPL” are almost the same as the letters in “BPEL”. No connection was made between BPL and BPEL in the essay.
Other surprises: (a) according to page 32 WSDL is a scripting language and (b) according to page 40 the application you need to read a PDF file is Adobe Photoshop. The book’s 42 nearly blank pages (out of 152 total) contain fewer inaccuracies.
There isn’t much to learn about BPEL in this book. The only benefit I could imagine anyone gaining from it is the enjoyment of its frequent whimsical–almost poetic–misuses of the English language. (Example from page 111: “both presents one problem to developers” ["present" intended]. From page 149: “BPEL can be compared to a child who comes from a mix race” ["mixed" intended].) I read it to the end for that very reason.
I was originally going to throw the book away but I’ve decided to keep it so I can share its profound insights with my friends. Example from page 101: “To clean out the toxins that are stored in the body system, proper waste management should also be taken into consideration.” From page 104: “When history is being talked about, it always connotes a significant event that happened in the past.” Page 148: “Since spending of hard-earned money is concerned, it is really very important to weigh things out first and be intuitive as to what the end results will be.” I’m shelving it with my humor books.
I was left with a grudging admiration for the author who came up with the idea of selling this book. (The book itself does not indicate a publisher.) He was smart enough to get $20 of my money for nothing.
Rating: 1 / 5
If you have the software buy this book .No free downloads available from IBM Site.Not useful to me.
Rating: 1 / 5
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
Rating: 5 / 5
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!
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a good overview of SOA concepts combined with Integration viewpoint. Integration is handled within SOA. SOA is about integration. Process Oriented Architecture was a term that was introduced. POA is about using BPEL to manage business processes with existing services.
All in all, a good review of SOA issues including ESB, WS specifications, XML considerations. Good explanation of concepts plus some of the nitty gritty details as well. Good all round.
There are 6 chapters:
1.Integration Architecture, Principles and Patterns
Review of different integration technlologies and types of integration
overview of integration challenges, process is important
SOA and its associated technolgies is a valid approach to integration
2.Service and Process Oriented Architectures
POA is centered on the processes that “use” the services while SOA is about”providing” the services.
POA is the approach from the business side of things. It is about business process and main standards include BPEL, WSCI, etc.
3.Best Practices for Using XML for Integration
Review of XML with tops and issues to watch out for.
4.SOA and Web Services Approach for Integration
SOA is not web services but web services are the specification/technology of choice in the arena.
WS applies to both EAI and B2B as well as SOA.
Included some on the specification process.
5.BPEL and Process-Oriented Approach
Familiarization with BPEL and POA together.
With a sample application of BPEL towards a Billing Process
6.Service and Process Oriented Approach to Integration using Web Services
Putting it all together with the Enterprise Service Bus(ESB).
Discussion of the ESB and what it offers for Integration and SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
The “Teach Yourself” series has done little to impress me until the arrival of this book. XML-based web services are getting traction as a truly standard way of enabling the service-oriented systems architecture. An architecture where systems can be built to expose services in such a way as to make it easier to integrate enterprise systems has been built many times already, but always ending up with constraints related to programming language, operating system and hardware. This book provides a good introduction to XML-based web services components including XML schema, WSDL, UDDI, SOAP and HTML with a comparison to the past attempts including DCOM and CORBA. The code examples require some analysis but are pretty helpful once you’ve taken the time to decode the XML and the scenario examples / case studies provide an interesting context to see how XML-based web services can be applied.
Rating: 4 / 5
As an introduction for both Websphere Integration Developer and Process Server, and limited to 400 pages, generally good. I guess there’s always the links listed in each chapter (and free IBM RedBooks) online for more detail (which I found I needed to clarify some aspects – e.g. relationships).
Mainly, it becomes annoying that it doesn’t have a coherent sample app being built through the book – instead, moving between loosely related examples. Also, while there is some code available for download, it’s only final solutions for multi-chapter blocks (i.e. not start & end stages for each lab).
Perhaps staged lab code is easily fixable on the download site?
Rating: 3 / 5
Thomas Erl covers SOA perfectly. The ebb and flow of the book is excellent. He does not cover proprietary technologies, and rightfully so. However, he explains the W3 standards of XML, SOAP, Web services and many key service models. He also is aware of corporate culture and thinking realistically as you take on a SOA implementation. This book has made me a better software developer. Keep things autonomous and keep things abstract.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book introduces bpel using oracle bpel engine beyond that this book fall short of introducing the bigger picture in terms of soa. the book also needs a revision. this book also suffers too much repetition and poor editing.
Rating: 2 / 5
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!!
Rating: 5 / 5
Someone once said: “he has an intelligent bookshelf”… Well, this book is not for a booshelf. It is for reading and having practical advantage in the confusing world of SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book does a good job of covering and tying together a broad range of material with respect to the title topic. It provides a varying degree of detail in different areas, for example a light treatment of SOA in chapter 2 yet a more in-depth look at XML in chapter 3. The intended audience is noted as architects and developers so this variance may make sense but it seems inconsistent at times. Overall I thought this was a good book for anyone interested in the topic and a good reference for those who have been tasked with an integration project.
Chapters:
1.) Integration Architecture, Principals, and Patterns – covers a wide variety of concepts including types of integration including data, application, process and presentation. It also speaks to layers of integration such as communications, brokering, routing, transformation and others. The authors touch on various technologies in the integration arena, for example, database access, message oriented middleware, remote procedure calls, transaction monitors and more. The chapter finishes up with a quick overview of the integration process, various practices activities and patterns.
2.) Service and Process-Oriented Architectures for Integration – talks a great deal about the concepts and standards that make up Service and Process Oriented Architecture. It is not an in-depth tutorial on either subject but is a good reference for the standards associated with them and why they are well suited for integration.
3.) Best Practices for Using XML for Integration – is closer to a tutorial on XML than a description of the architectural rationale and implications of it with respect to SOA. Since part of the target audience is developers the level of detail in this chapter is not un-warranted. This chapter includes a comparison of JAXP API’s and shows a number of XML schema and XSL stylesheet examples. It also speaks in reasonable detail to validation, security, encryption and performance considerations with respect to XML.
4.) SOA and Web Services Approach for Integration – steps more deeply into the area of web services and again much of it is directed to developers as opposed to architects. It contains a good overview of various patterns and contains some guidelines on their usage. The chapter contains a light review of web services for B2B and EAI and then a more detailed description and examples of interoperable web services, WSDL and WS-I.
5.) BPEL and the Process-Oriented Approach for Integration – speaks in more detail about BPEL and what the authors refer to as “the process-oriented approach to SOA-based integration.”. This chapter addresses the usual suspects of choreography, orchestration and complexity in a clear fashion. It then goes into more depth on writing BPEL processes and works through a fairly complete example.
6.) Service and Process-Oriented Approach to Integration Using Web Services – gets to the heart of the notion of using SOA for integration by delving into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This chapter covers the ESB at the appropriate level of abstraction for an architect and touches on key areas such as mediation, transformations, communications, transactions and security.
Conclusion:
I enjoyed the book and felt it delivered on the topic of SOA Approach to Integration. Trying to target both architects and developers is a difficult task but readers from either area will find something useful in this book. It is not the definitive work on SOA and Integration but it does a good job of tying together a broad range of material and will be a welcome addition to anyone’s technical library.
Rating: 4 / 5
Without having any understanding of web services, I was able to run an example web service within 30 min and completely understand the inner workings. The book makes no assumptions on skill level but doesnt bore you with over explanation. The book also shows how to use other languages such as Ruby and Perl to utilize your services. Its teach from example method will provide you with helpful starting points for your own projects.
Rating: 5 / 5
The real value of this book to architects is its pragmatic presentation of enterprise integration strategies for service oriented architectures. The author detials a range of implementation scenarios, pifalls and best practises according to the IT maturity of the enterprise.
The book presents a complex topic in a sufficiently organized and clear fashion to make it suitable as a starting point for enterprise clients to understand the language, strategic opportunity and challenges of Service Oriented Architectures.
This book is a must have for architects and technology consultants involved in implementing service oriented architectues.
Rating: 5 / 5
I like this book. It’s very useful for a web developer.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good book for those seeking an initial view of process and BPEL. The book covers the basics of BPEL profile 1.1, and until chapter 4 is a good resource of information. I don’t like books that binds the technology to an specific implementation, and that’s the case of the book after chapter 4, it binds examples to Oracle BPEL process servers (which I’ve already used in production and find it a poor implementation) and Microsoft Biz Talk (never used it). It would be much better if more real world examples could be provided instead of specific providers mechanisms for deploying, creating etc. This should be a readers choice, and the product manuals take care of that. I’m a great fan of the author, have read many of his books, this one had everything to be on my top shell, but, if only there was no more chapters after the 4th.
Just my 2 cents.
Rating: 3 / 5
The other reviewers here have said enough, this is a great book. The writer’s narrative style is excellent, the book logically progresses from simple examples and concepts into the more complicated ideas and problems, and takes time out to talk about the pros and cons along the way. Highly recommended and I hope we’ll see more books by the author.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book, explains the concept of Web Services, of, forms clear and deep.
————————————————————————-
El libro, explica el concepto de Web Services, de, forma clara y profunda.
Rating: 5 / 5
i like the book becuase it provides versioning solutions
it gets complicated from time to time but when you read it again it makes sense
i also like it becuase of its size and the many chapters that explain in detail what are contracts
very good guidance for java people that struggle with the language to create efficient contracts for services
Rating: 5 / 5
I liked the book and would’ve given it 4 stars except that in trying to learn how to implement the concepts and examples I became frustrated. The authors did a good job with putting the chapters together and presenting the information. The book order example is intruguing but incomplete. No where is there reference or links to download samples. Trying to follow along with the choppy pieces they present is frustrating. IBM Press site is useless so…gentlemen, I must give you a mediocre rating for a technical book due to incomplete/missing examples. Shameful and sloppy!!
Rating: 3 / 5
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An excellent software book that I have read in years. It is too the point and explains all the topics nicely and has good enough examples to get you started right away.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book demonstrates how SOA has risen in just a few years to a practical means of bolting together disparate online systems. Where these might have been coded and run with different languages and operating systems and web servers. Specifically, the book is concerned with the main choices out there these days. Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft .NET. (Yes, Microsoft appears to be deprecating the “.NET” in some of its recent marketing, but for techies, that’s still how we all refer to it.) Oh, it turns out there is a 3rd alternative, as the book is careful to point out. CORBA.
There are a set of standards that make all this possible, and the text explains these. The lowest level is simply to use XML for data interchange. This gets around the alternative of binary data interchange, and all the compatibility problems therein. The latter was the realm of CORBA. But that proved brittle in many practical deployments.
Another standard is the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). This and BPEL let you construct interoperable “parts”, that can usefully interact with other programs on the net.
There is lots of practical advice. Like the fact that parsing large XML documents can be slow. So you should not use XML to communicate between tightly coupled components. Plus, the book offers numerous patterns that can simplify your design efforts. These patterns have proved successful in existing applications, and you should take advantage of them whenever possible.
Rating: 4 / 5
I am reading this book after looking at some other WebService books, and this one is climbing the charts.
All the chapters are very thorough and I am quite surprised that not many people have discovered this gem.
Grab a copy and read it, and you will become a confident and knowledgeable web services developer.
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s a practical guide on defining service characteristics and design principles in multiple levels, from component implementation to application design to enterprise architecture. Very digestive material.
Rating: 5 / 5
I did learn a lot which is all that you can ask for. The book is thin – less than 300 pages, and the author writes in a good conversational style. It is a good tutorial but it probably does not make a good reference as it does not go into too much detail in some places. For example it does not explain how to create a handler when it returns a false value (how is the response created?), and a little more detail on the client side BARE style. Also, the code examples do not use logging correctly. But these are very small annoyances compared to the overall learning.
Rating: 5 / 5
To get right to the point, this book is written in a very easy to read and accessable style, with just the right diagrams and illustrations in the right places to aid in understanding.
I’ve never programmed with web services, but I need to know the terminology and basically what it’s all about. This book served me well in this capacity.
It is not a book that goes into detail as to exactly how to do programming. This book is not technology specific, but rather after spending the first half easing the reader into exactly what web services are and why they exist, shows at a high-level how they are created with several different common technology platforms.
Also, there is a chapter on real world web services so the reader can go out and see exactly what web services look like when they are deployed in the “real world”.
If you’ve never programmed a web services application before, I seriously doubt that you’ll be able to do it after reading this book, at least nothing more than a simple example application. And in that sense, the title is a bit misleading. Perhaps it should have been “Introduce yourself to web services in 24 hours.”
So, I can see how a certain type of reader might be dissapointed, but this book is exactly what I needed when I needed it.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book will tell you how professional WSDL files look like, enough of those auto-generated pieces of…..
Rating: 5 / 5
The authors having had real world experience on how to develop SOA, have presented this book focusing more on practicality. They have worked in different websites and online companies where they specialized either in the development of SOA or working on a specific web language that also leads to the architecture.
Because of their experience with Packt Publishing and their real world experience for SOA, Packt has chosen them to write this book about SOA Integration.
Clearly this book requires deep familiarization of the components discussed in SOA. XML and Web Services are extensively discussed so that developers will understand why the mark-up language (XML) and approach (Web Services) is perfect for integration which eventually leads to SOA. For those who are beginning in SOA, this book provides explanation in great detail in the basic concepts of SOA – from the challenges until specific terms that will greatly influence in building an application using the architecture.
What is even interesting is that it provides an insight to an alternate to JavaEE and the .Net framework. If you have a vague idea of what COBRA is, then this book will enlighten you further why this application web language could help you in building an application.
Some parts of the book are great for beginners while other parts of book are intended for advanced users. If you are looking for specific instructions on how to integrate XML to SOA, then this book will help you. For beginners or for those who just wants an in depth information of SOA, then this book will also be of great assistance.
Ultimately, this is a great addition to your library as it provides the basics while introducing you to the advanced concepts and principles behind SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
J2EE Web Services is an excellent reference and tutorial for both beginning and seasoned Web services architects and developers. This book is the first to fully cover the WS-I 1.0 Web Services standards and their integration with J2EE 1.4 components. Spend time with this book, and you’ll soon master J2EE Web Services and be able to successfully use this technology to solve key business problems in your enterprise.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a response from the Publisher, Packt, in reply to the two reviews below…
The code examples in the book have been written for the Oracle BPEL Process Manager version 2.x, which has been one of the few working BPEL engines at that time (2004, former Collaxa engine). In the mean time, Oracle BPEL Process Manager has been upgraded to version 10.1.2 and code examples required some minor modifications. New code examples have been available from the publisher’s web site (www.packtpub.com). If Oracle BPEL Process manager is installed appropriately, code examples definitely work.
Please notice that the 2nd Edition of the book is about to be published in January 2006. The 2nd Edition has been improved, particularly with the introduction of SOA and BPEL, and coverage of advanced features of Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk.
This answers the complaints in the last two customer reviews, thank you.
Packt Publishing
Rating: 5 / 5
Michael does an outstanding job of explaining to the readers how to successfully design a service oriented architecture. This book is for technical folks like architects, developers, and test leads. If you are not technical, this book is not for you. If you are technical, this is a must have. There are enough books about SOA vision. This book is the “how” for technicians. Great stuff!
Rating: 4 / 5
This book was overall pretty good. The author details Service and Process Oriented Architectures (SOA/POA) and presents a solid approach to SOA integration. The highlight of the book is Chapter 6 (which, by the way, could have titled better!) that really dives into ESB (Enterprise Service Bus).
I gave it 4 stars mainly because it kept me interested throughout AND Chapter 6 was well worth the wait. Also, the author was direct and decisive in what he was saying. I never felt while reading that he was talking over my head or down to me from some higher plateau.
Some criticisms which kept it from a perfect 5 include:
(a) Too many repeated themes. I felt at times that I was reading the same sentence and paragraph over and over. Not a major thing, but I think I read that XML is a “standard” for organizations to exchange business data more than twice!
(b) The author throws around many acronyms, some of which without expanding. At one point, he used “PO” to refer to “Purchase Order” and I really had to stop reading and thing about what on earth a PO was (duh!). There are several examples of this throughout the text making it a bit difficult to read.
(c) Related to (b), I would have liked to read more background on some of the technologies discussed. Examples include the Java technologies that the author refers to throughout. I’m not a Java developer, so I felt a little behind in some of the discussion.
(d) I think the author spent too much time on his low-level XML discussion. I realize that XML is integral to SOA but for a book designed for “architects” and “senior developers”, as the back cover suggests, it seemed too deep for “architects” to care about and too shallow for “senior developers”. It might have been better to present an XML primer and leave it at that.
(e) By reading this book, I DO NOT feel ready to build an SOA, nor do I feel qualified to jump into a team implementing SOA.
Chapter 1 was a sufficient setup for the chapters to come. It would have been good to build a better case for SOA, though. If I was on the fence about SOA, I don’t think this book would have convinced me that my organization needed to go down this path. This chapter does however provide a lot good background and helps draw the line between different integration strategies.
Chapter 2 introduces the ESB — which for me is the most interesting aspect of the SOA approach. There is also a good discussion about processes and orchestration, which was enlightening (coming from me, who has no real world SOA experience).
Chapter 3 was the lowlight. I found myself skipping ahead when the author started discussion XML schemas, namespaces, declarations, and the like. I know this stuff already and was wondering how an “architect” or “senior developer” (I’ve been called both) would treat this chapter. I concluded that they would do essentially what I did: skim it. It is too light to be a reference and too heavy to be of any practical value.
Chapter 4 was better than the previous chapter. I like history (IT Evolution, and WS Specifications) and discussions on Patterns (the author discusses integration patters, business patterns, composites, application patterns, and runtime patters). He does however loose me a bit on writing WSDL and the simple web service example. I’ve written several web services and understand the concepts so I found myself skipping ahead a bit.
Jaded by some of what I read in Chapters 3 and 4, Chapter 5 got me back in the mood. BPEL. Finally. The book had been talking about BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) on-and-off and now this chapter gave me a heavy dose. Good job.
Chapter 6 was my favorite chapter by far. ESB is an area of interest for me, and to have it explained and examined in the context of SOA was eye opening. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to read this book in the first place.
All-in-all, I learned a lot from this material. I took a few notes, which will lead to further research on my part. This book presents a good overview of some of the complexities and key points in building an SOA infrastructure/environment. Get it if that is what you’re looking for!
Rating: 4 / 5
This book reminds me the crash courses. The book is for a quick introuductions and a helpful examples to understand. This book starts with the introduction to web services and continues with xml-rpc and an example in java. Next chapter is about SOAP and instruction is provided to install and configure Apache SOAP server. The book continues with WSDL and UDDI and examples in java. This can be the best book as an introduction to web services, but not of the one when you need to deliver some code by next month.
Rating: 5 / 5
Advanced computer libraries will find Web Service Contract Design & Visioning for SOA a fine compendium for WS design and SOA, allowing both beginners and experts insights into the SOA Strategy and process. College-level collections strong in software engineering will find it a fine survey of web service contracts that enable services to be reused and tweaked for years to come. From versioning techniques to basic XML design and message design with SOAP, this is a detailed, in-depth reference highly recommended for any college-level collection catering to software engineers.
Rating: 5 / 5
A very good and useful book to start using IronPython. You only need to have an idea of programming (any language) before starting with this book. It will be useful for both the Python programmer or the .Net programmer.
The demo application is done following good programming practices and common patterns (something very much welcomed).
The book shows how to use the language in desktop and web aplications; Silverlight and embedding it into your c# apps. (Ex: as an scripting option for your users to extend the program).
It reads pretty fast. I didn’t find any cruft on the book, something that is not very common with technical books. Along the chapters you will find pointers to resources in the internet to deal with subjects that are not specific to the book but they are mentioned or referenced somehow.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is really lacking on much useful information. It’s mostly a high-level overview. For anyone seriously interested in web services I’d recommend getting a different book!
Rating: 1 / 5
This book provides a very thorough coverage of web service development using ASP.NET. I found the step-by-step configuration sections to be very helpful, and also found the more detailed coverage of the framework, including ASP.NET security and interop to be helpful. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5
As someone who knew ABSOLUTELY nothing about web services when I started, this book was the best of the 1/2 dozen titles I perused because it balanced high level understanding with the nitty-gritty and code examples. I found this book far most useful than titles such as ‘Web Service: A Manager’s Guide’ and ‘.Net Web Services for Dummies’.
As someone who is not particularly technical, the code segments were still very useful in understanding what is going on. Without looking at a little code, understanding web services and its components becomes too esoteric. Why would you just describe an elephant when you can also provide a picture.
As someone who was just trying to understand web services and had no interest in comparing specific vendors’ web services offerings, the chapters on commercial tools such as Apache Axis, Java, .NET, IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic, and their specific pros/cons was not terribly interesting to me. But I could see how they would be valuable to an IT Professional.
The book does not really take 24 hours. Overall, I spent 9 intense hours working through this book to developing a good grasp of the technology. I recommend the opening chapters of ‘Understanding .NET’ by Chappell as a great supplement. Chappel gives great brief high-level descriptions on the components of web services and how they came about.
…
Rating: 4 / 5
As Web Services get implemented, this book can be a vital tool in planning for the deployment. The authors have a rigorous methodology to estimate the many performance issues encountered when you try to build out an actual Web Service. They discuss important ideas like content delivery networks, which cache or mirror content at different physical locations, so that the response time to a user’s query is minimised. And it also adds redundancy. Think Akamai, for instance.
A crucial aspect they explain is how to develop a cost model for a data centre facing a certain expected rate of queries coming in from the net. Practical advice on what things to cost out and how to do so, as shown in various examples.
Most books on Web Services published after this book often discuss the networking together of various services. Using WSDL or BPEL to describe these configurations. BPEL may not have even existed in 2001 when the book was published. But the book is certainly not outdated. Nothing in it is tied to a specific version of a Web Services grammar. Those other books are more about explaining the syntax. Few delve into actual deployment scaling issues that cannot be avoided if you have to go live.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve been using a lot of RESTful services these days and have been waiting for a good book that is dedicated to the topic. I recently received a copy of ‘RESTful PHP Web Services’, which does a successful job of outlining proven concepts in current web technology. If you want to learn the methods for creating and consuming RESTful services then you will find many examples in this book. From the architectural plans to well thought out code samples, the book covers a lot of ground in a relatively quick read.
The first chapter gives the reader a quick introduction to RESTful services and the most common PHP frameworks in use at the time of writing. I particularly enjoyed the section on the Zend framework due to the explanation of benefits over the other frameworks. The chapter also covers the very basics which include a detailed look at exactly what RESTful services means and what technologies are required to use and benefit from a RESTful architecture. The second chapter gives a quick run down of the various methods in use for consumption of data; these being Curl, several HTTP methods, processing data with XML, DOM, and SimpleXML. After those are covered there is a simple example of consuming services like Flickr using the previous methods. This transitions into many more examples of consuming real world services that any developer would find interesting and exciting for data mashups.
The real meat of the book starts in chapter four where we get into designing the resource utilization systems and then the resource clients in chapter five. Those topics basically go over the nuts and bolts of gathering data, manipulating it, updating it, as well as creating fresh data. We get more instruction and usage examples on the Zend framework in chapter seven where the author gives us information on the controllers, models, and view (MVC model). This would not be too useful without knowing how to debug the code that we’re using so there is, thankfully, a chapter dedicated to debugging XML building and parsing errors. A couple of short appendixes cover the author’s own WSO2 web service framework as well as REST Client Classes which should prove useful for writing your own reusable classes.
Overall this book covers the majority of topics that a new developer needs to understand in order to start developing and deploying RESTful code and web services in PHP. From frameworks to consumable service samples, and everything in between, RESTful PHP Web Services comes through in a concise and enjoyable style that will not disappoint. I highly recommend this book for developers that are new to this topic or experienced developers that need a quick refresher course.
Rating: 4 / 5
When you sign up for a Web services and/or full Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) project, you’re also committing to learn about a host of standards including XML, XML schema, XML namespaces, WSDL, WS-Policy, and WS-Addressing. It’s a sad but true fact that these are far from intuitive, and can be quite intimidating to both architects and developers. To make matters worse, ignoring or improperly implementing these technologies greatly diminishes the chance that your project will be successful.
Luckily, there’s no need to go it alone. Thomas Erl and a collection of industry experts have added to the authoritative SOA series with this helpful book aimed squarely at assisting architects and developers to effectively take advantage of these essential standards. Using clear, easy-to-understand language it explains basic, intermediate, and advanced concepts, making it suitable for readers of all levels. It also includes extensive best practices regarding the important topic of governance. Comprehensive case studies are found throughout the book, providing realistic guidance on how to properly apply the lessons learned.
Rating: 5 / 5
Although the title is new, this book is based on the authors’ 1998 book titled “Web PErformance Metrics, Models and Methods (ISBN 0136938221). This book is more than a minor rewrite – the chapters are in a different sequence, and each has been updated. None of the information that made the older book such a valuable resource was lost in the process. For example, the material on queuing theory and analysis remains, and it among the best written tutorials in print. What has changed includes:
(1) Shifting of focus from client/server and web server environments to web services, with an emphasis on performance characteristics of SOAP and UDDI. Client server issues are still covered because these issues are still germane.
(2) An emphasis on architecture and how performance and capacity fit into a larger picture. Network and server performance characteristics are examined in detail.
What hasn’t changed includes the excellent material on performance and benchmarking basics, detailed analysis techniques, and the support for this book that the authors provide on the book’s web site. I especially like the Excel spreadsheets that you can download to use in conjunction with material in nearly every chapter.
Overall, this is one more of a series of books on various aspects of performance and capacity management. I also recommend reading their companion book, “Scaling for E-Business: Technologies, Models, Performance, and Capacity Planning” (ISBN 0130863289), which covers the applications level of e-commerce systems and seamlessly complements the material in this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The thing I like best about this book is that it covers the WS-I Basic Profile. In response to one of the other reviews that complains that the book doesn’t cover JAXM or ebXML — please note that J2EE doesn’t include support for these technologies. This book provides a thorough review of all J2EE Web services technologies, and the information in the appendices goes way beyond the JWSDP tutorial.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers the .NET web service framework very well. Even though it was written in 2002 I still recommend it for its thoroughness and utility. It was very well thought out and covers the important points of interest in a level of detail that is both practical and thorough.
Rating: 5 / 5
First part of the book while describing Distributed Systems, Middleware and EAI lays strong foundation for Web Services. Second part of the book provides an extensive reporting about Web Services Architecture, related standards, service composition and BPEL. Though at the outset this book looks like serving academic purpose but it also provides the great insight of the subject to the programming community.
This book is must have which draws detailed conceptual and architectural views on Distributed Systems, EAI and Web Services.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is really lacking on current or useful information. It’s mostly a cursory high-level overview. For anyone seriously interested in web services I’d recommend getting a different book! 271 pages not counting the index or glossary. Barely shelf material of limited usefulness. copyright is 2002, but book was written well before that date or century.
Rating: 3 / 5
To learn how to build and use web services, you first must determine what they are and how they differ from current technologies used in the development and use of web pages. With the exception of being based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), they are only different in degree from widely used web technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASPs) and Java Server Pages (JSPs).
The authors do a good job of explaining what web services are and how they differ from other technologies. They also do not fall victim to the evangelical bug, being very explicit in pointing out the disadvantages of web services as well as the advantages as a chapter is devoted to each point. Another chapter is devoted to comparing how web services differ from other technologies such as ASPs, JSPs, Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
The middle section of the book is devoted to describing the architecture of web services , the basics of XML, how web services communicate using XML and Simple Object Access Prototcol (SOAP), how web services are described using Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and how to advertise a web service using Universal Description , Discovery and Integration (UDDI). While not detailed, it is a complete introduction to all of the steps you must go through to create a complete web service that others can use.
The third section is devoted to describing several tools that can be used to build web services. Commercial tools such as Apache Axis, Java, .NET, IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic are covered and the authors are to be commended in also showing how they can be built using inexpensive and free toolkits. Finally, the last section covers topics such as the interoperability of web services, how security is included in web services and what some of the future trends in web services may be.
This book is an introduction to web services, so it is not possible to learn all of the specifics you need to build complex web services from it. However, if you are a beginner, there is enough information to get you started and to help you make decisions concerning whether you want to start building them.
Rating: 4 / 5
A very nice introductory book on Web services, much different from all the others on this topic.
Excellent overview of the problematics of service oriented architectures on the Web and of their relationships with their EAI counterparts (corba,rpc,..).
Rating: 5 / 5
I am using this book for a graduate level class about Web Services. I like the books approach on giving you enough background about middle-ware evolution that makes it easier to understand what Web Services are trying to accomplish. Given that the actual technology (implementation details) change so much in this area the books approach makes a lot of sense. I also found explanations to be concise and clear.
Advice: if you are looking for a hands-on how-to book about XML this is not the book to pick up. Otherwise, if you are looking for a good fundamentals book that will help you paint a big picture of Web Services this book is great!
Rating: 5 / 5
I liked the book, but I’m a web developer and all of the winforms stuff turned me off. I thought Python was a great web development language? I know it is versatile, but I would have preferred web focused examples. Not a biggie, but it was a big reason why I skipped some big sections with all the win forms setup code right in the book. How helpful is that really anyway?
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is exceptionally well done! I’ve written 3 books on Web development and I’ve written a number of articles on Web Services. I’ve also done a number of presentations on the subject at users groups around the country. I thought I understood the power and future of Web services, but Barry helped me understand the service-oriented architecture and how this what I really saw the promise in. Barry did an incredible job of bringing this topic all together. I found the book tremendously inspiring too! You won’t be disappointed by the content in this book. You’ll likely come away with 100 ideas too! Great job Barry!!! I can’t wait to read your next book!!!
Brad
Rating: 5 / 5
IronPython is the first dynamic language developed for the .Net plateform. At first, .Net didn’t support this kind of language. This is something that keeps on coming back througout the book: you have to use some additional tricks to unleash the power of .Net dynamic and static languages.
The book starts with a general introduction to IronPython. A quick review of the language itself is followed by the use of the .Net assemblies. At the end of this part, one is comfortable enough to do some small IronPython programs.
The next part is dedicated to what IronPython offers thanks to Python and to its affiliation to .Net. The authors go through standard Python (battery included) and the somewhat associated .Net assemblies (some arguments on using one or the other could have been a big plus to the explanations), depending on what must be done. Because or (or thanks to) .Net, several pages are dedicated to XML, as it is needed to simplify the description of UIs. Also several useful designed patterns are presented with the .Net approach.
The next part starts with WPF, the official graphical interface, with several ways of using it (bridge from C#, XAML, …). Then WMI (used for system administration) is handled, but from my point of view, it is the weirdest part. WMI has its own language which does not seem like C# or Python. Besides, PowerShell, presented as well as a way of doing system administration, has its own language. There is a book dedicated to PowerShell, so only the communication between IronPython and PowerShell is handled. So two additional languages in this chapter, perhaps too many (they are limited to this chapter).
IronPython is a .Net language, so it is possible to do ASP with it. A chapter deals with this approach, chapter well written but it needs to follow the associated example in your favorite IDE if you want to follow what’s happening. Web means also web services and databases, handled in one chapter. The basis of SQL tools addressed, as well as basic webservces (mainly REST). I have to say that there are some mistakes there, as SOAP is not only used with POST HTTP requests but also with GET requests (it can be seen in the official w3c specification) and also with other transport protocols than HTTP. Perhaps these are .Net implementation’s limitation, in which case it should have been mentioned. Finally Silverlight integration allows developping light clients that can interact with other langages as well as the web page.
Throughout the book, complete interaction with other .Net languages was not addressed. It is the goal of the last part to show how assemblies can be used in IronPython and how IronPython scripts can be used from .Net static languages. As I’ve said, the interaction does not go completely smoothly, there are several solutions to accomplish it. At least, the book does not only speak about the upcoming .Net 4.0 that will help this interaction.
As a conclusion, those who need a dynamic language (to script an application) can go for IronPython, th first dynamic language for the .Net framework, compatible with the langage Python 2.5, and in that case, go for this book that will help you for anything.
Rating: 4 / 5
Although an old book, this book explains very well web services. It has detailed explanations on XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
Make no mistake. The book is old and just like some other reviewers pointed out, some of the technologies have been replaced by newer ones. But once you understand how web services work, it’s easier to adapt to the newer tools.
The author also has a tendency to add ‘filler pages’. The last 50 pages are useless which is why I gave it only 4 stars.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you want comprehensive high level overview of today’s enterprise software landscape, this is a must-read.
One of the best books which answers the question , Why Web Services?? Unique perspective on middlewares in general.
Do not expect any code examples or details of any particular middleware.
Rating: 5 / 5
This relatively short book on implementing RESTful web services in PHP wastes no time in diving straight into the code. After a brief introduction of the primary HTTP methods and their usage with cURL, the book gives us some good examples of mashups using real world REST services. This is good because it gives the reader instant gratification with regards to using a RESTful service in PHP.
A few code samples show some frowned-upon programming practices (such as using nested if statements), but all of them serve the intended purpose of giving a practical explanation of the preceding content; also perfect for beginners to PHP. There are chapters on designing and developing RESTful servers and clients, but to be honest not enough emphasis was given on RESTful design. However, that may not have been the intent of the author; the book definitely does it’s job of teaching PHP programmers how to implement and consume REST web services. The last two chapters on using the Zend framework to do things in a more clean manner (using the Model-View-Controller design pattern) and on debugging web services is a definite bonus for the book.
If you already some idea of how your RESTful service should look like, and you don’t consider yourself to be an advanced level PHP programmer; pick this book up to get started with your implementation!
Rating: 4 / 5
After reading a couple of dissapointing web services book, I went looking for a better J2EE web services book. I was thrilled when I saw Richard Monson-Haefel had written a web services book because several years ago his wonderful EJB book got me started with EJBs. So I had high expectations for this book, and I was not dissapointed. This is the most thorough coverage of J2EE web services that I’ve read. Equally important as what is in the book, is what is not in the book. Web services is a topic that can be an endless pit of specifications and APIs that you will never use. By focusing on technologies that are endorsed by the Basic Profile for Web Services, this book helps you focus on those technologies that are currently useful and stable. I’ve found most web services books get so lost in every specification and version that they never have time to really explain the practical issues of developing web services. This book instead provides tremendous detail on the important practical issues. In addition, by focusing on the stable and interoperable aspects of web services, the book will makes it easy to see how to develop web services that will actually work and be interoperable. And most importantly, the book is clearly written, technically accurate, and easy to learn from. So I thank the author for another wonderful book and I hope he will be writing books in all the future topics I need to learn.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a little more expensive than most of the flashy Web Services books these days but it is well worth the money. Set in small font and not wasting pages on chapters like “History of XML and SOAP” this book is dense in content on the architecture of distributed systems, including Web Services. We get to learn about the issues of distributed transactions and the differences between conversations, coordination and orchestration. The text is precise but nevertheless easy to follow. One of the best books I have seen on Web Services architecture.
You can find a sample chapter on the author’s site:
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/alonso/Web-book/Chapter-5.pdf
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book to be just right. It explains the value of SOA and the basic architecture. It skirts the technical stuff, which is fine for this kind of book. I think it’s great for a manager or a consultant pitching SOA.
I give it 4 instead of 5 due to the overuse of force field analysis and the lack of a point in the later chapters. More than half of the book is extremely useful. It would get 5 if they chopped out the useless stuff and the excessive use of force field analysis.
Rating: 4 / 5
I found it to be a very good intro for beginners in XML Web Services like myself. Highly recomended.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book and Programming Visual Basic .NET by Francesco Balena have answered virtually all of my questions about building production distributed database applications using XML Web services. If you’re interested, you can download a sample of my working code at http://www.opointe.com
Rating: 5 / 5
This book, accurate and concise, will guide you through the world of PHP RESTful services. Thanks to simple and easy to understand examples, you will learn to create a client and a RESTful server.
To illustrate that, the author is relying on the cURL and SimpleXML libraries to setup the communication.
One chapter is also dedicated to the Zend library (Zend_Rest) allowing RESTful services integration with this framework.
Icing on the Cake, the author provides at the end of the book his own source code to consume REST services.
This code, very easy to understand, works with or without the cURL library and will allow you to do some practice and apply all the good advices provided all around the book.
A book that I would recommend to PHP beginners, but also those who are yet mastering it and want to setup their own services.
Rating: 5 / 5
While I just got my print copy of Michael Foorde’s excellent book, “IronPython in Action,” I’ve been using it and referring to it for the better part of a year. There’s a back story here, so be prepared.
I’m not a computer programmer, I’m an engineer who occasionally needs to do a bit of (rather frustrated) computer tinkering. For that, I’ve long used Matlab (a product of the MathWorks company). Matlab works well for most things, but it has some rather serious technical limitations. More importantly, though, it’s tremendously (prohibitely even) expensive. In contrast, Python is free, OpenSource and solves many of Matlab’s serious problems.
So, a little more than a year ago, I did a bit of investigation and eventually decided to try IronPython. It tied into Microsoft’s .Net library, it was real python, and it worked flawlessly on Windows. There was, however, just one problem: I didn’t have the time to figure out Python programmming on my own. That’s when I found Michael’s book. And it has been a godsend.
As I said above, I’m not a computer programmer and computer programming isn’t a skill I’ve ever wanted to properly acquire. My idea of computer programming is to find someone else’s example and then poke and prod until it does something relatively close to what I need. I don’t have the attention span for most books on the subject, and I don’t have a great deal of desire (or any serious motivation) to learn better skills.
Foord’s book simultaneously addressed two very real problems: 1) my own ignorance, 2) my impatience for results. The book nicely balances the need to teach skills with the need to show results. And I was well satisfied. The included examples are excellent, and I was able to get up and running on my own projects quickly. More importantly, though, I picked up quite a few insights on how to properly write a piece of code. For both of these reasons, this book easily earns its five stars. If you are interested in Python or .Net, it is an excellent reference. Do yourself a favor and just buy the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Then the world got more complex. We started connecting the web to databases so that much bigger sites could be developed with huge amounts of data. ==Then we wanted to do eCommerce, and we needed a way to do credit card validation. So our servers talked not only to our database but connected to some other system to get data about the credit card’s validity and to deposit the money received.
There have become a huge number of web services available. To list just a few, there’s Amazon, eBay, Google, FedEx, Pay Pal, InterFAX. From a web site you can link to these sites and get information from them that you can then integrate into your own site.
With this huge number of web services that have become available, there have become a new set of problems. Which services, which interfaces work in the real world? ==In this book, Will Iverson presents his experiences with several real world, actually operating web services. He provides detailed examples of contacting several big web sites including the programming necessary to interface to them.
This book is written for the Java journeyman. To quote from Chapter 3, “You should be familiar with basic object-oriented development, know how to add libraries to your class path, understand TCP/IP and basic networking, and be familiar with basic JSP-based web application development.
I’m not. I use Cold Fusion to do my web programming. I found the descriptions in the book entirely adequate to get me started in programming what I needed. I’m glad he did the programming because that proved that the services worked. What’s important in this book is not the programming, it’s the real world experience of what’s really working right now out there in the real world.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good book for everyone to learn XML web service! It is very straightforward and easy to understand!When reading this book and following the instructions step by step, I learn a lot of concepts and understand the basic ideas of XML web service! After reading this book, you can read the advanced books about XML service! I really recommend this book to all of you!
Rating: 5 / 5
Good book but, like many a computer programming book, it has numerous errors. For example, I just struggled with the code in Chapter 2, listing 2-13, until I figured out that the variable needed to be persisted (since ASP.NET was my programming language) using ViewState. Stuff like that is irritating, and there’s numerous such mistakes. Another one, from chapter 2, is that doc.Load(Application.StartupPath…) needs to be written:
string myXMLpath = Path.Combine(Request.PhysicalApplicationPath, @”MYXMLDOC.xml”); //need System.IO namespace!
doc.Load(myXMLpath);
Stuff like that is irritating but you can figure it out.
And frankly, I prefer using a database instead of XML anyway, but that’s another matter.
Rating: 3 / 5
The book is a good introduction to PHP web services, cURL and DOM. It goes into details of building a web service from scratch. That is good for understanding, but I would much rather use a framework from WSO2 or Zend.
Book has a lot of examples. Though the examples have a few problems
1. Very basic sample programs for RESTful server.
2. A lot of code is printed, but with very little explanation.
3. Code explanation does not offer more than what you would get by reading the code itself. No options or pitfalls are described.
4. Printed code formatting is awful. Statements wrap around, instead of line breaks and indentation. Random words are highlighted. Bold words have no connection to the concept being explained. For example, frequently (but not always) functions have plain “return;” highlighted.
All that makes the book hard to read.
Before buying the book, check websites for WSO2, Zend, Flickr and Yahoo. They have good documentation and tutorials.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book is written but Cutter Consortium consultant Dave Barry and is packed with practical guidance on strategies around getting management to understand where they should be headed. This book should be purchased immediately by any manager undertaking a large web services project.
Along with this book, I would also recommend the purchase of another book by the same publisher named Java Web Services Architecture for the development staff.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great work to the authors! I bought this book in june but just recently done trough it. Sure there are mistakes, but I haven’t found 1 book that doesn’t!
I don’t believe it is fair to say that this makes to book grabage. I think the editor should provide a better infrastructure to make adequate reviews/corrections to these manuscripts.
In general, I think this book deserves thumbs up considering that it has been writen few months ago.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many of the practice examples do not work with Visual Studio 2008.
Much has changed since the publishing of this book. And if you are keeping up with the new technology of Microsoft this book is outdated. Published in 2002, the new paradigm is WCF.
I would like to see and own a book that explains the new WCF, with database examples to AdventureWorks, Microsofts practice database you can download and work examples.
That is my humble two cents review.
Thank you,
-robert
Rating: 1 / 5
The writers either do not understand the topics, or they want to confuse the readers intentionally. You will find their writing style extremly annoying. They use the Skatestown(??) example to mislead the readers whenever they need to explain something. I dont know how such a bad written book can make it out to the book stores. If you buy this book, it will be the biggest waste of money.
Rating: 1 / 5
The explainations are lenghty. Need better organization of contents!
Rating: 3 / 5
This book not only presented over 80 patterns but it also tied them together with working examples of when and how to use them as well as an overall way of creating enterprise and domain inventories.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve always wanted to use Python more. Mostly I use it to write little one off scripts when I want to move a bunch of files around or parse some text. I was really excited when Manning asked to to review IronPython in Action because I wanted to dive a little deeper into Python and possibly use it in some web applications. “IronPython in Action” makes it easy to get started using IronPython right away.
The book starts out with an introduction to Python itself and continues with a general description of how IronPython can use .NET types. It starts off by showing how to build a Winforms app using IronPython. If anything exposes the cruel, unnecessary complexity of .NET, it’s got to be a Winforms app. The IronPython examples are easy to follow and it’s always fun to create and manipulate a Winforms app using the IronPython console.
Chapter 4 talks about using Design patterns in IronPython. This is a refreshing change from most language books where patterns aren’t mentioned at all. The chapter builds an IronPython application and uses the MVC pattern for the overall architecture and the command pattern for the implementation of the menu bar events.
Chapter 7 discusses agile testing and unit testing using IronPython. I almost dropped the book in amazement. Unit testing is almost never mentioned in any language book and is relegated to a niche or advanced topic. Find a book about any other .NET language that mentions unit testing that doesn’t have the word “testing” in the title. This alone sets the quality of this book far above other language books I have read. It’s not just enough, in my opinion, to discuss the syntax of the language. You have to teach the reader how to use the language in your everyday work.
The next section, section3, deals with a few core UI frameworks commonly used during .NET development, WPF, Silverlight, and ASP.NET, as well as showing how you can use IronPython to administer your system. Performing tedious tasks is my most common use of IronPython. I use it to automate moving files that fit a specific pattern out of my “downloads” directory to their proper places. It was great to learn a few new techniques for using IronPython in Powershell.
The last section talks about extending IronPython using C#, something which it sounds like should be avoided unless you just can’t achieve decent performance with the equivalent IronPython code, and using IronPython as an embedde scripting engine. Python is used a lot in game programming because it’s easy to embed. The nuts and bolts of the game engine will be written in low-level C/Assembly while the game logic and story is written in Python. I love the idea of having an embedded scripting engine in my application that will allow me to quickly extend my application at runtime. The user need to perform a new calculation on some data? Just send them an IronPython script and have them put it in a directory. It’s a great idea and the book describes exactly how to do just that.
My overall feeling about this book is that it’s a great book. The authors use the same humor and dry wit that Python is known for to great effect. Making the digestion of a very different language easier. I’m sure that as I continue to experiment with IronPython that I’ll keep this book close at hand.
Rating: 5 / 5
I read this book – sleeping a great deal through it, or daydreaming about nothing in particular. “Whoops I just ‘read’ 20 pages!” types of experiences were frequent with this one.
This is NOT to say the book does not explain Web Services, whatever those are. It MIGHT explain what Web Services are, but we’re never really sure. It’s sort of like Microsoft’s spiel on Web Services – you know, how they are always talking about how GREAT Web Services are. Web Services are just wonderful. That is apparently all we need to know.
So, if you are looking for another book that describes in acronym-laden (not explained) detail how great Web Services are, without actually explaining WHAT they are then this book might be for you. There is a pretty picture of a peacock on the cover so that’s nice.
P.S. For those interested to know what Web Services are, I’ll save you money and tell you right away, since I just recently discovered the answer on my own: Web Services are an idea that involves everything being online, and not sitting on your desktop – that is on servers. Like files and folders for instance, software, video games, etc. – with Web Services it would all be online and you could ‘lease’ or ‘rent’ the stuff you needed when you needed it and you would get it for a certain amount of time over the net, presumably downloaded onto your computer where you would use it feverishly until your time expired and it ‘dissolved’ into zeroes and one’s. That’s my thinking on the topic, and this book won’t make you any wiser.
Rating: 1 / 5
It seems very hard reading this book (Not about the difficult of Java and Web Services, but how they are presented).
I Think once You have finished to read this book You are able to do nothing.
Sorry…only my opinion
Rating: 1 / 5
There is nothing of value in this book. It’s all filler. Each chapter begins with the reminder that WSDL means Web Services Description Language.
Here’s a typical sentence (page 31):
When you try to at look (sic) at the Internet, you will be amused to know for yourself (sic) how useful, how modernized, how high-tech, and how beneficial it is to the whole mankind (sic).
And that’s the high point of this book!
If you find this “information” useful, put your money down.
Rating: 1 / 5
I’ve recently readed this book while travelling to and from work, and my goal was to learn more about Web Services, and precisely those that gave XML responses, so this book was a good candidate.
The book contains what it says: all about web services in .NET. This is good, because you can always have it as a reference book whenever developing web services. It covers SOAP, HTTP POST and GET protocols, ASMX web services and WSDL-created proxy classes, UDDI and DISCO files, state management, caching, session and state management, and even asynchronous examples.
The only “bad” thing about the book that I’ve found is the “STEP BY STEP” sub-header… At least in this book it means “complete examples in every chapter”.
The book is 373 pages long (apart from the appendixes), at least one third of that being code examples. And of that 100+ pages of code, the majority is trivial basic WS code that seeing one is ok, twice maybe, but the third time you just skip to the bold part that marks the “important” code.
The authors could have avoided full samples from later chapters, instead only showing the relevant code snippets.
But anyway, as I started saying it is a recommended book to learn (or get deep into) .NET web services development.
Rating: 4 / 5
I had his Xml book for C# 2005 which was outstanding. But now with LINQ to Xml it is even better. This is THE book to get on Xml with C#. It is all you will need.
It has served me well.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you want practical implementations of SOA and code snippets of how to do things do not buy this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
Barry gives a readable, high level explanation of Web Services and their latest incarnation – SOA. He contrasts the latter with the pre-existing EDI, which might use CORBA or DCOM. SOA is presented as much easier to make modular, without any strange binary formats. The virtues of using XML as the underlying data exchange format should be apparent to the reader.
He suggests how a company might want to redesign its data functionality so as to use an SOA approach. This can be confined entirely within the company’s machines, or perhaps to offer Web Services to outsiders.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book did it for me! I was struggling reading numerous books on how to get started developing a Java web based application. Here in this book it explains clearly in steps (snap shots) how to configure Eclipse with the various technologies. How to write basic but essential JSP , Servlets..etc and how to debug it and like wise.
Read the iterations. It was very rewarding for me by the time i completed reading and practicing the examples given. It boosted my confidence towards continuing to learn everything I need to know about building Java web based applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book take a long time to arrive at any substance on Schemas and is only good for total novices to world of XML Schemas. In-fact the real schema is seen only half way through the book. It definitely is a boring read.
Rating: 1 / 5
It is a very comprehensive and well structured refference, specialy on technical aspects.
Rating: 5 / 5
Mr. Goldberg writes clearly and constructively. My XML knowledge before reading this book was fuzzy at best. Now, I’m an authority on the subject. Fantastic reference.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was very disappointed with this book. I was hoping for something that would go into detail of the various Web Services solutions offered by Amazon, Google, etc. Instead it is just another Java book filled with mostly code (is it a sin to use prose anymore?) and lacking in any kind of detailed discussion at all. It basically talks about very specific problems, offers some code, then moves on to another specific solution. I found it completely uninteresting.
The only person I would suggest this book for is someone who wants code to Cut and Paste without really understanding what they are doing. And good luck to them
Rating: 2 / 5
Good coverage of SOA, author tried his level best to explain the concepts by using an example.
Rating: 4 / 5
I am very impressed with the book so far (need to finish). It holds true to the previous Visual QuickStart Guides that I have read in that it has tons of examples that go along with concepts. I have read many XML books and this book covers all the major topics concisely and clearly.
Rating: 5 / 5
Though I have had some experience in Java, Eclipse, and WTP, a recent project required me to get more into depth. This book got me through the whole development process. It explained to me clean coding techniques when writing web apps in Java, how to get my web server up and running for use with WTP, to get my apps to talk to the server, debugging using different tools, and unit testing in a web environment.
This book was an invaluable addition to my collection, and is also a great reference now that I have mastered these concepts.
Rating: 5 / 5
Review:
“Perspectives on Web services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” Zimmermann O., Tomlinson M., Peuser S.; Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2003.
This voluminous text is essentially about the classic man-machine relationship model.
The reviewer became interested in this topic and monitored the slowly evolving field until 1962 when he published a paper entitled “Shaping and Controlling Human Behaviour in Man-Machine Systems”; Proceedings of The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Industrial Administration and Engineering Production Group, Vol. 177, Number 34, pp 935-950; 1963 (1 Birdcage Walk, Westminister, SW 1).
He presented the Performance System Spectrum with Man at one end and the Machine at the other. In between these two extremes he defined and illustrated a multitude of combinations including Simple Man-Machine, Complex Man-Machine, Men-Machine, Man-Machine-Man, Man-Machine-Men, and Men-Machine-Men.
By 1963, time-sharing and remote operator terminals had evolved and the computer systems were mainframe…the personal computer and the Internet, if they were envisioned at all, would have been considered purely science-fiction. In relation to the Men-Machine-Men system, he wrote: “…the total system has become so complex, with so many inputs from and outputs to human(s), that design engineers tend to move towards a fully automated system…” In the more than four decades which followed, the flood of computerized systems (and computer acronyms) increased as anyone reading this can testify. And that brings us to today…and Web Services.
We shall see that Web Services satisfies the definition and is a Men-Machine-Men system. To quickly understand what Web Services is the average reader shouldn’t start with the text under review but with an excellent article, “The Web Within the Web,” Enrique Castro-Leon, IEEE Spectrum, February 2004, pp 42-46. Examining this paper first and then delving leisurely into “Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” will have a higher payoff even for those readers who are experienced software engineers, developers, analysts, and systems architects.
Castro-Leon presents a concise thumbnail view of this emerging concept. He argues that “…dusty, musty databases filled with useful data that would be far more useful if linked with other, equally dusty databases; enormous databases that are locked up inside ancient mainframes and quaintly archaic minicomputers; lonely databases residing on specialized file servers throughout an enterprise (pronounced business); even modern databases on Web servers…(are) stuck in long-obsolete proprietary formats or accessible only through hypermodern scripting languages…” Further, “… Web services are a way programmers can make their databases available across the Web , let other programmers access them, and tie these disparate databases together into services that are novel, perhaps even wonderful…” This, of course, is the basic reasoning for improving the Machine part of the Men-Machine-Men performance system.
“…Web browsers have liberated us from the tyranny of specific hardware and the near monopoly of the Windows operating system…(because of)…the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which provides a standard for the way Web pages are downloaded from a Web site to a computer, and the generic nature of Web pages themselves…” The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) “,…was designed to encode things that will be viewed by people, rather than processed by another machine. HTML mixes formatting commands…with data because it was designed as a display language…” Castro-Leon continues: “…if Web services are to build powerful networks of collaborating databases and services, the first step is replacing HTML with something more compatible with the world of databases, something that can be understood by another computer…such a new language has been developed…a subset of HTML, called XML, for Extensible Markup Language…”
This movement to improve the Machine subsystem did not end with the invention of XML. There had to be some mechanism to move XML data rather than HTML across the Internet. This was SOAP — Simple Object Access Protocol — a generic wrapper which is an envelope recognized and accepted by Web browsers and servers. Together, XML and SOAP give Web Services interoperability.
However, another specification was needed called UDDI —Universal Discovery, Description and Integration — which, as Castro-Leon states, “…lets Web Services look for databases (by Machine) in the same way that Google lets humans look for Webpages…” But the process didn’t end with the development of UDDI. There had to be a standard which allowed the Machine to determine what is at a site once it has been identified. This standard was WSDL — Web Services Description Language. All of these protocols took years to develop….and the improvements continue to this day.
Having presented an overview of Web Services from Castro-Leon, it is now time to review the 648 page text entitled, “Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects” This is in essence a “how-to” or a “cook” book, using an old world term, which goes into exquisite detail about how these software elements work inside the Machine and how to utilize them effectively and profitably. One might describe it as a “Web Services for Dummies” type of text but written at a much higher intellectual and professional level. The occasional humor is within acceptable limits and not extreme.
In the Men-Machine-Men model, the Machine is represented by all of the computer systems in the Internet world-wide and includes SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI as software and all of the hardware world-wide. The Men at one side are all the humans dealing with the Internet as users while the Men on the other side of the Machine are all the software people feeding the Machine world-wide with data and graphics which are then manipulated inside the Machine by SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. You can visualize that the users might have a population of millions and possibly billions of individuals and the software people might represent a population of millions of individuals. That is why this volume on Web Services is an important reference today as the system is being implemented — but there is a cautionary poem by the systems guy Kenneth Boulding regarding this Machine:
A system is a big black box
Of which we can’t unlock the locks,
And all we can find out about
Is what goes in and what comes out.
Perceiving input-output pairs
Related by parameters
Permits us, sometimes, to relate
An input, output, and a state.
If this relation’s good and stable,
Then to predict we may be able.
But if this fails us – heaven forbid
We’ll be compelled to force the lid!
Having forced the lid — you are now inside the Machine! The book is structured using the “goto” branching command. The authors encourage the reader to study a section and then decide to continue on or “goto” a different section. In fact, they suggest not reading from cover-to-cover at all but selecting those parts directly related to the reader’s job role.
The text is neatly divided into Perspectives chapters which follow a typical project sequence: Business, Training, Architecture, Development, Operational, Engagement, and Future. The authors state that they and their anticipated readers are “technical people” and their approach in writing was shaped in that way
Chapter 1 is The Business Perspective. In 30 pages they discusses definitions, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), B2C (Business-to- Consumer), B2B (Business-to-Business), A2A (Application-to-Application), H2A (Human-to-Application), and potential inhibitors to decision-making. The Case Study of a fictitious insurance company is introduced which will be threaded throughout the book. Some of the flowchart models are clearer than others.
Chapter 2 is The Training Perspective. A better term for this perspective would be the “technical information” found in a manual used by individuals for self-instruction to learn about the software. 123 pages are devoted to a tutorial of concepts and technologies but the reader is not expected at this point to be able to apply them.
There is an overview of WebServices concepts and detailed information on the XML markup language including namespaces and schema. Attention to given to SOAP message formats and encoding. This is followed by WSDL, the interface description, containment structure of WSDL documents, and binding-related document elements. There are descriptions of UDDI’s registry structure, identifier bag, category bag, binding template, tModel structure, linking to a UDDI registry, an API (Application Programming Interface) overview, and brief mention of WSIL (Web Service Inspection Language). There many well-designed coding sheet examples which would make sense to experienced programmers but probably not to novices.
About 86 pages are assigned to Chapter 3: The Architecture Perspective. The authors provide an introduction to Web Services architecture oulining paradigm changes, J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and defining Web Services as the software part of the Machine. WSA (Web Services Architecture) is explained with the use of stacks and a disclaimer is provided since not all of the terms are universally accepted. WSA building blocks and component walkthrough is covered. Explanations are given for WS principles, Generic vs. Generated API, design patterns, business patterns, architectural patterns (microflow, intermediary, and interceptor/pipeline) and process choreography including public-to-private process mapping. Architectural decisions are outlined along with service matchmaking. In addition, NFRs (Non-Functional Requirements), gaps and countermeasures and SOAP Section 5 encoding are discussed. Finally, XML-based, WS, and application layer security are explained. There is a useful FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section ending the chapter.
Chapter 4 is The Development Perspective. Consisting of 192 pages, this chapter has a considerable amount of meat and consequently may cause indigestion for the vegetarians among us. The authors state that a reader should have a “…solid reading comprehension of J2SE and J2EE APIs…” It is written at a fairly deep level of detail related to reader motivation and categorizes this interest as: casual, steady or junkie. There is an emphasis on “goto” branching. Most of the coding examples are also found on Springer websites.
The introduction to the development of WS in Java presents the WebSphere Studio Workbench and Eclipse.org. WebSphere SDK (WSDK), the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), and Apache SOAP 2.3 are described with some caveats regarding known flaws. This is followed by JAX-RPC and Apache Axis, definitions, an introduction to WS for J2EE and JSR 109 and the WSDK Toolkit.
At this point, starting on page 259, the first example or case in The Case Study is considered — all the prior pages having been dedicated to technical information to bring the reader up to speed. The authors refer to the example as a “sample” and it is, of course, a simulation where the case problem is run on the WS model being described so the reader can learn how to do it later in real-life. More precisely it is a training simulation testing (with some debugging) of the solution provided by the authors….the author’s terminology will be used here.
The case scenario involves several fictitious insurance companies. In terms of the Performance System Spectrum, this scenario deals with the Men-Machine-Men model with Men being Internal Users and the Machine processing risk and fraud management matters. Business logic requirements are considered and “The Great Debate” over Apache Soap or JAX-RPC occurs, followed by configuring and building the sample. To build RPC/Encoded Services for Java the bottom-up and top-down approaches are reviewed. There is a discussion of building EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) WS with Apache SOAP, and using the WS Wizard. The process of exploring and modifying generated files is described. Building EJB WS with JAX-RPC and JSR 109 follows, In addition, exploring generated server side files, updating the project build paths, modifying generated files, and testing the deployed service are briefly delineated.
The reader is encouraged to build RPC/encoded services from WSDL first creating WS from WSDL using Apache SOAP and then testing the WS client. There is also the process of creating WS from WSDL using JAX-RPC/JSR 109 and updating the WSDL document and installing the SOAP Router, and finally testing the WS. A section is devoted to programmatic access to WSDL, using the WSDL4J toolkit, testing the JWSDL application and creating JWSDL clients with JAX-RPC and JSR 109. The reader learns to use WS-Inspection to build service indices from Java and also with Apache Soap and to configure WSIL4J.. There many excellent figures illustrating this part of the simulation. At this point, the text moves ahead to the use of UDDI.
There are discussions of UDDI access from Java and browsers, using UDDI with Apache SOAP and also with JAX-RPC and JSR 109, using other Web Services bindings, creating a document/literal Service from WSDL and a document/literal Service Client. A secton is dedicated to orchestrating Web Services and use of the Process Editor. The reader learns about using attachments with SOAP, using SOAP headers and finally exporting the completed sample. While space is assigned to finding more information, there isn’t any for FAQ which could have been useful at this stage. Some System Administrators have argued that constructing the application in this chapter was the easy part. The next stage deals with implementing it in a production environment and might be viewed as more difficult.
Chapter 5 presents The Operational Perspective which the authors have truncated to 79 pages and rely on the experience of the reader to fill in some technical gaps. There are many specific references to coding samples in .zip format on Springer websites. This chapter deals with the system architecture hosting the software and we are now deep inside the Machine in the Men-Machine-Men system — and continually aware of Boulding’s admonition: “….If this relation’s good and stable, Then to predict we may be able. But if this fails us – heaven forbid, We’ll be compelled to force the lid!…”
There is a discussion of topology, standalone topology, additional components,and clustered and managed topology. Reference is made to the Access Management Subsystem, load balancing and high availability support. At this point, the Case Study simulation of a fictitious insurance company continues and for the remaining pages is interspersed with tutorial information .
There are explanations of Deploying Web Services, the WebSphere Application Server, deployment and configuring the application server. There is information on JDBC configuration, JAAS authentication and Cloudscape, and restarting and testing the installation. Next comes Deploying Services, wsadmin, ANT; working on the private UDDI Registry, including configuring and adding WSDL documents to the UDDI Registry. Descriptions are provided for testing, clustering, and node agents; working with the IBM HTTP Server, starting, testing clusters, and finally cold standby.
Attention is given to Securing the WS Implementation: security threats, countermeasures, WS-Security, and future WS-Security extensions, Securing WS with HTTPS and SSL — as the simulation continues. The chapter closes with the WS Gateway and how to configure it, deploying a WS to the Gateway, updating and client testing. Frequent mention is made of specific websites to support the simulation so the reader is not completely alone with just the text.
Chapter 6 is The Engagement Perspective of 27 pages and a typical reader would sense that the end is in sight!! This chapter reviews many technical points emphasized in the Case Study simulation and adds the following: Planning a WS Development Project, Outlining Requirements and High Level Design, Planning and Staffing, Running the Project, including testing and going live, Success Factors, Elements of Risk,lessons learned and design advice. There is a final look at the Case Study simulation.
The Future Perspective appears in Chapter 7. The authors briefly identify SOAP Version 1.2, WSDL Version 1.2, UDDI Version 3.0, and grid computing for the immediate future. The Semantic Web including RDF and OWL are mentioned and they provide mid- and long-term visions.
The chapter concludes with “Now enjoy the first project in which you apply and exploit this hot technology!”
There are rather complete coding steps, flowcharts, and screen displays in the boilerplate content of the Appendix including: Building the Case Study Policy Systems, Java to XML Mapping, and C# — and 87 References for those who desire additional background.
As Castro-Leon in summarizing his IEEE Spectrum article said: “…the semantic Web’s benefits won’t be seen for some time; Web Services are here today…it will connect almost every island of data, software, and device on the planet…” The reviewer believes that this volume which introduces Web Services is a valuable asset in the drive to improve the Men-Machine-Men system which we call the Internet.
Leonard C. Silvern
Systems Engineering Laboratories
Clarkdale, AZ
Rating: 5 / 5
This book just happens to be *first*. Just wait until some of the other XML Schema books that are listed as “not yet published” hit the racks. You’ll forget about this book rather quickly.
In my opinion, this book serves more as a reference and doesn’t really serve-up any good ideas or suggested practices. In addition, one of the most annoying aspects of this book is the SIZE OF THE PRINT. It’s so darned big on relatively small pages that when they referred to a figure, I would sometimes have to go backwards or forwards 2 pages. It almost reminds me of writing my college thesis… make the font bigger, spread the text further apart, move in the margins… voila 100 pages…
Rating: 2 / 5
I am a developer of web systems. I’ve owned this book for about six months now, and I’ve yet to find anything of any value in it. It kind of makes me wonder about who would find this material useful. Overweight college professors in gray cardigan sweaters, smoking pipes maybe?
Rating: 1 / 5
This is an excellent book for people wanting to learn SOA Suite 11g.
The composite application created during the tutorial is non-trivial and includes Web Services, BPEL, Business Rules, JMS, Database Adapters, BAM, Error Handling, Eventing, Unit Testing and more.
The book provides everything you need to learn SOA Suite 11g, clearly written and at a nice pace.
I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5
You must have a very good understanding of XML, WSDL, SOAP, AND UDDI and html code. The book explains everything from the point of view of a programmer/developer.
Rating: 1 / 5
This weekend I had the opportunity to read RESTful PHP, by Samisa Abeysinghe, published by Packt Publishing. The book is short, about 200 pages, but full of great information about what REST is, how it is used, how it is supposed to be used and how to use it with PHP.
The book assumes you have a working knowledge of PHP, and how to install extensions (or use existing ones). The concepts are clear and concise. Samisa is direct, but explains the reasons for why code is the way it is, or explains what can be done different.
The books runs through many examples using Yahoo! and Amazon APIs. Most of the book could be called a manual for use of CURL and SimpleXML, as well as some DOM work. Although you will not need to know any of those things before picking up this book.
In a short seven chapters Samisa explains what rest is, who uses it, why it is used, and what you can do with it. Samisa walks you through consuming (or using) REST APIs and also how to setup your own APIs using the REST style and architecture.
I would recommend this book to any beginning and middle tiers PHP developer as it is a quick reference to REST and APIs that you know you already want to be working with.
Rating: 5 / 5
The cover of this book says, “Timely. Practical. Reliable.” and that is a good description of the book. It covers the current state of Java APIs for web services, it gives plenty of well thought out examples, and it provides enough information to actually make the alphabet soup of acronyms understandable. The book starts with an introduction to web services. The next section covers web services architecture and the standard technologies of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Interoperability with non-Java applications is demonstrated with a .NET example. The book is written by three Sun employees so it does tend to be a bit Sun-centric as the next sections shows. The Java Web Services Developers Pack (JWSDP) is given plenty of coverage. JAXP, JAXB, JAXM, JAX-RPC, JAXR, may be just acronyms when you get this book but after reading the six chapters covering the JWSDP they will be technologies that you understand. A case study wraps up the six chapters putting the whole thing together. The book ends with a chapter on security and a look at Sun ONE. The book is full of examples demonstrating how to use each of these technologies. When you read a line such as, “The real fun is understanding how the EncryptDecrypt class works,” you know you are dealing with authors who love code. For developing Java web services you will be hard pressed to find a better book than this one.
Rating: 5 / 5
As a Software Engineer looking to discover the patterns and concepts that are driving the SOA initiative I found this book to be extremely informative. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who hopes to become a successfully member of a SOA. The SOA initiative being done at my company has definitely benefited from our reading of Erl’s material.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is about how to create web-services using JAX-WS. Unfortunately, JAX-WS perpetuates the java-first RPC-style of web-service development. According to Thomas Erl, this violates several of the principles of service orientation and, as a result, these type of web-services do not belong in a SOA. The amazing thing is that the author acknowledges this but still devotes most of the book to doing it the wrong way.
While you can develop WSDL-first document-style web services with JAX-WS, it is not its primary mode of operation. There are several other very good frameworks which which encourage best practices and are generally more appropriate for web-service development in Java. My personal favorite is Spring Web Services.
Rating: 1 / 5
To give a brief background about myself. I have been one of the primary contributor and committer of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) eclipse tools project since its inception through WTP 1.5 release. I contributed the Validation Framework component for this project. I read a large portion of this book and can say that this most comprehensive book that explains the complete WTP in a step by step fashion that can be help you easily understand the whole WTP project, its sub projects, its components and features through several real world examples. I strongly recommend this book to all users and contributors of WTP.
Vijay Bhadriraju, IBM
Rating: 5 / 5
The reason I bought this book was so I could quickly get through some hands-on examples and see the power of WTP. Also, I thought it would be really helpful to see various web development tools through the lens of Eclipse development. After going through it, though, I’m afraid I can’t recommend the book for those purposes.
But first, let me applaud the web development “wisdom” portions of the book. There are some really good “why are we doing this?” and “why are we doing it this way?” explanations in this book. Nothing to do with WTP, really, but these portions of the book were very well done.
The majority and purpose of the book are the hands-on exercises. Here’s where I had some issues. Throughout the exercises, the reader is always being asked to go out and download some tool or another. I spent way too much time at update sites, trying to get the right versions of things. I would rather all of this be established up-front. Just say “if you want to do all of the exercises, download these specific versions of these 8 tools”. Later, there can be some explanation as to why those tools over others, but lets get a platform that’s going to do everything, and not sprinkle installation issues throughout. In fact, I think that in an Eclipse book, they instructions should say, “start with a clean install of (some version of Eclipse) and build it with (these versions of these plugins), and you will be able to do every exercise.”
I know it’s not the job of the authors of this book to detail a tool’s installation, but a line like “check the (some tool) documentation for the exact list” is a cop out. Presumably, the authors just got done using the list, so a few words as to how to find the list within the documentation would be really helpful. With a little guidance, digging time could be reduced from an hour to two minutes.
The exercises had separate iterations, which I found helpful. I did run into discontinuities that required some improvisation, though. I’m pretty sure that nobody sat down with an empty machine, installed all of the tools and ran all of the exercises, start to finish. Or if they did, the book didn’t get updated.
The book was written using WTP 1.5, EJB 2.1, etc. These are older versions than what’s currently available, but it’s not a problem to run through the exercises with the older versions. The problem comes at the end of the exercise when they give you a “tease” about how cool the next version is. I resisted temptation for almost the whole book but finally I grabbed some updated versions to try out the cool new stuff! Bad idea. I backed-up to earlier exercises, and although I was able to replicate most of them under the newer versions of things, there’s not enough detail to get through quickly (lots of trial and error). And when I was finished, I wasn’t convinced it was an optimal result. But I just couldn’t sit still with the old versions when the authors were plugging the new versions.
A picky issue I have concerns references to other books. I don’t think they belong in the main text, really. They wouldn’t even need footnotes. Just a recommended reading by chapter would be sufficient. If you are more of an academic than someone who needs to apply this stuff quickly, maybe reading these other books might be a possibility, but I’ll tell you I’m not going to make time to read a 9 year old EJB book!
I’m not sure that pitching to a WTP user and a WTP volunteer developer in the same book was really in the flow of the book. This is a picky one too, and there weren’t that many pages dedicated to this topic. I suppose there’s a need to recruit, it’s just that I’m not sure the audience overlaps very much.
The bottom line for me is that a book should simplify the task of setting up the environment so that I can concentrate on the “why” and “how” of coding. Although I wouldn’t have enjoyed the “wisdom” and other continuity the book offered, I don’t think I saved any time on the development environment. I spent as much time tinkering with the development environment as I would have if I had just grabbed 6 or 8 tutorials from 6 or 8 different authors off of the internet.
Rating: 3 / 5
Very interesting read… Sas gets deep into talking about as3 xml. even though i wasnt too happy about not covering xmlsocket this book i would recommend this book to anyone who works a lot with xml. good job sas!
K
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a pretty good overview of web services–although it’s a little heavy handed with xml. Bottom line is that i6t would be easy to wal away from this book thinking web services is simply xml schema–and miss the bigger picture.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is the perfect book for Managers. I also purchased the perfect book for developers and architects. It is entitled: java web services architecture. They both should be purchased together.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is very well written and covers the topic SOA in a very structured and clear way. The author approaches the topics from a real life perspective based on actual experiences. It provides exactly what the title promises.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book does a good job at explaining a complex subject. My big complaint is that the way it handles certain things were easy on the author, not the reader. For example, why would I create an application that acts as a Web service, but have it running as a console application? Wouldn’t I much rather have it running as a proper Web service?
Rating: 3 / 5
I have half way through the book and found the book to be comprehensive.
However, author completely ignored JAXM, ebXML.
Rating: 3 / 5
The steps are very clear for begginers.
I’m happy with the purchase.
Juanje
Rating: 5 / 5
This book gives exactly what it says it will. Lots of good info and practical applications of XML in the classic and new versions.
Easy to read. Lots of examples.
Rating: 4 / 5
Book is a software technical reference. Book was delivered in a timely way, and was in excellent condition.
Rating: 5 / 5
I thought that this is a book very specific to certain aspects of web services and examples are overly detailed…I dont expect the book to be compiled mostly with elaborative examples.
Rating: 2 / 5
Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise- A step by Step Guide David S. Linthicum Published by Addison-Wesley
The author takes a practical approach to a project role out. Often the pace of technology outstrips the best of us. This book is a great help. For those tasked with setting up a cloud environment, the book gives you a good road map. If you are new to the concept and just adding to your knowledge base, the content is easily understood. It does not matter if you are a CEO or a student; the take away is an insightful understanding of Cloud Computing in general and for the Enterprise in particular.
Discussed is why the cloud matters and when you should use it. Some books just hype the subject, not this one. Instead, you get a clear understanding on what your ROI should be and the potential pitfalls. The book also covers the planned migration, breaking down each service and testing.
I would recommend this book for any person with an interest in Cloud Computing.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers a lot of SOA, but it makes it in a way that is very boring and doesn’t get to the point (any point) as fasta as someone would like.
Bottomline, this is a good book for reference but not for learning how to make a SOA from scratch
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve had this book for several months now, and read various sections of it. Though not all. Kinda lengthy, you know. But you can use just the portions needed for your stuff. Erl’s examples help give it flesh. I find the jargon is still sometimes too much. But he didn’t make that up. Seems to be what we all’re stuck with in SOA.
Be VERY cautious of some other recent reviews of the book. Two or three of them gave very negative reports. But mayhaps they didnt read very much of it? Hey check this out. Some of them only have done one review. Of this book. Bit suss, eh? Are those real reviews? Heck, are those real reviewers?
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a good start to someone who want to know about SOA ans Web Services, I high recommend it.
Rating: 4 / 5
I did not find this book very helpful to implement web services.
I would say it’s the introduction of webservices like a first lecture of a semester long class. You got the idea.
Rating: 1 / 5
Once again, authors David A. Chappell and Tyler Jewell produce a masterpiece of technical genius. Just when we thought they couldn’t top their opus maxum, we find yet another fine jewell in their collection.
Personally, I read Java Web Services in about 20 minutes, which is an amazing accomplishment considering I was asleep at the time.
This book gives object oriented programming a boost of adreline and steroids and allows them to all run on the same platform.
I first bought this book because I was looking for a compiler that I could run in AIX and EBCIDC, but then I just ported it to my Windows 98 machine because that was too complicated for me.
My favorite chapter was where Chappell illustrates the parable of the bicycle and the Java programmer. I wont tell too much or I’ll give it away. You’ll need to buy the book to find out more about the parable.
Needless to say that Larry King can’t be wrong about this book. He’s read it and is now programming CNN’s mainframe computers.
They said it could not be done, but I drank enough Java cola to read this sucker in 20 minutes. I’m reading it again right now as I type this review. I loved this book. I’m going to buy copies of it for my entire family. I gave one to my wife as an anniversary gift.
Buy it, you can’t go wrong, if for nothing else, buy it for the cool goat design on the cover.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve been using this book for over a year now to develop a production application with EWS. This is the only book out there on this topic that I am aware of, so you have little choice in the matter. Fortunately, the book is well-structured, well-written, and pretty comprehensive. And it is “straight from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak. The samples are very helpful. Per a previous reviewer’s complaint, they are all console-mode apps just to simplify their build and use. If you want to make a web service, you’ll have to adapt and extend. I was particularly grateful that for push notifications, the authors actually went to the trouble to write out an embedded HTTP listener instead of presuming you would be content to run under IIS.
Be aware that MS has a new, higher-level API in beta now, called the EWS Managed API. This newer API eliminates a lot of the drudge coding in the SOAP proxy API described in this book. I don’t think there has been an update to this book for the new API, but I would hope Mr. Sterling et al are planning one, or even better, a new book on this topic.
Rating: 5 / 5
While this book was quite up to date when it was published in 2002, the advances in the understanding of Web Services since then suggest that you consider a more recent text.
Specifically, there has been a buildout of Service Oriented Architecture, due to significant interest by many developers. Also, a new language has emerged – Business Process Execution Language. This was in response to people using WSDL and finding that while it adequately described a given Web Service, it had a harder time with more involved business logic. And with trying to aggregate multiple Web Services into a larger, dispersed entity. While one method might have been to upgrade WSDL, instead, BPEL was chosen. Starting afresh. But using WSDL and the ideas learnt from it.
Rating: 3 / 5
The author is very thorough with the xml uses with the appropriate examples
I needed the first five chapters to acquire the skills i needed to complement with the xslt. This book is good compared with some i have reviewed in the past 7 years.
Definitely novice to pro book as titled
Rating: 4 / 5
I have had some prior exposure to xml but by no means am an expert.
The writing sytle is easy to follow and the book contains plenty of examples, and tips to provide you with a greater understanding of the material. The book progresses with each chapter and builds upon what you have already covered.
The book explains the basics and simplifies some of the more complex aspects of XML in a format that is easy to follow.
I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn the XML.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am not a developer but I have to test interfaces based on a SOA that use XML. I needed a good book which would give me the basics of XML. For my purpose this book had more info than I needed. But it was easy to understand the concepts and the syntax of XML, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema and Namespaces.
Rating: 5 / 5
The worst technical book I’ve ever seen. Pages and pages of useless XML with a couple comments intermixed. 200 pages of worthless screenshots and not one practical example.
Rating: 1 / 5
If you’re looking for a single volume on XML to give you many of the answers you need, I would suggest checking out XML In A Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O’Reilly).
Chapter list: Introducing XML; XML Fundamentals; Document Type Definitions (DTDs); Namespaces; Internationalization; XML as a Document Format; XML on the Web; XSL Transformation (XSLT); XPath; XLinks; XPointers; XInclude; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO); Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL); XML as a Data Format; XML Schemas; Programming Models; Document Object Model (DOM); Simple API for XML (SAX); XML Reference; Schemas Reference; XPath Reference; XSLT Reference; DOM Reference; SAX Reference; Character Sets; Index
As you can see, there’s a lot of ground covered here. Since XML is such a diverse set of standards and technologies, different readers will probably get differing amounts of value from this book. For instance, if I was delving into CSS for a website project, this book wouldn’t give me much of what I need. The coverage on CSS is very light and introductory. Conversely, if I was starting to use SAX, the initial chapter on SAX along with the reference chapter would give me a solid foundational base from which to work. It seems that most of the quality material is found in the core XML standards. And as with most Nutshell books, they are not meant to be tutorials for the beginner. They provide a no-fluff reference for the professional to refer back to for quick answers. This book coupled with a stand-alone book on a specific XML standard would be a great combination.
Is it perfect? No. But it will give you a lot of information in a single location that will prevent you from having to comb through multiple other volumes.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a great reference book for people interested in SOA. It contains in-depth definitions on SOA terms and concepts. The best part of the book is that is uses real world situations that a reader can relate too to describe the uage of SOA design patterns.
Rating: 5 / 5
Eben Hewitt’s JAVA SOA COOKBOOK provides programmers and collections catering to them with a fine review of SOA architecture standards, packed with Java and XML code and recipes alike. From building data models for SOA applications and real-world web services to improving reliability and working with forms, URIs, and custom bindings, this is a ‘must’ for any serious web programmer working with Java applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
I like this book and am still reading it and I think I can pick up lots of skills and knowledge about Web Services. One more thing I want to mention here is that I accidentally hit a button on amazon web pages for purchasing this book so I ended up buying 2 copies of this book, a hard copy and a soft copy. I should get refund on the soft copy becuase I never review it online. The following is the part of the order info for the soft copy:
Order #: D01-8384140-5827130
Subtotal of items: $ 11.99
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Total before tax: $ 11.99
Estimated Tax: $ 0.00
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Total: $ 11.99
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Total for this Order: $ 11.99
Rating: 5 / 5
hard to read.
too much large.
imposible to finish the book, and to learn nothing with this book.
Rating: 1 / 5
I got this book as my first web service reference and haven’t needed another. Trying to learn WS technology by reading the standards was pretty daunting. I eventually came to find out that many companies don’t provide all the pieces. They’ll promote some proprietary legacy technology (that isn’t quite useless), or worse, label an early (functional) product ‘obsolete’ and then never release the new-and-improved successor. This book brought everything together and explained a lot of the side issues and practical trade-offs. I especially appreciated the way the book maps standards (e.g., JAX-RPC) to an implementation (in this case, Apache Axis) using UML. The accompanying web site ([...]) provides updated content and code samples.
While this book is WebSphere-oriented in the development examples, the accompanying explanation provides ample information to permit the reader to adapt them to other Java tools. Developers living in the C++ and .NET worlds might benefit from an additional book, but the practical explanations and breadth of coverage of this one make it valuable to anyone working (or just trying to come to grips) with web services.
Rating: 4 / 5
Eclipse Web Tools Platform: Developing Java(TM) Web Applications
This is an excellent book; I specially liked the iterative approach (for example, for presentation tier, iteration 1: HTML, iteration 2: add CSS, iteration 3: add Javascripts, iteration 4: XML and XSLT, iteration 5: DTD)authors have taken. I have used examples from this book, with Eclipse and NetBeans, of course for Eclipse user this book has added value, since it goes through configuration of Eclipse and recommended practices. Please ignore the gripe about errors in the code; there are two minor errors which are detailed in the errata on book’s companion site, it doesn’t take more than a minute to fix those two issues.
Authors discuss All three tiers in great detail. How about this, by page 85 you would be deploying a simple web service (and you would be amazed how simple it is).
Rating: 5 / 5
True, this book provides a comprehensive look at XML Schema, but the order that the material is presented in leaves much to be desired. It is not until chapter 7 that we begin to learn how to string together element declarations to start building a schema. Chapters 1-6 deal with XML Schema history, a sort of quick tour that does not take the place of a tutorial, Namespaces, Schema composition, Instances and Documentation and extentions. While the “inverted pyramid” approach to revealing information may be academically correct — it has not helped me learn XML Schema efficiently. This book is essentially a retelling of the W3C XML Schema Recommendation.
. Based on a search here at Amazon, it looks like there may be a book coming from O’Reilly based on this material.
I gave the book 3 stars, as the book seems to be accurate and complete. I don’t think that having this book is necessarily a bad thing, perhaps just a bad place to start.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book was very helpful in getting me up to speed with XML Schema. It was written well and I have provided the added detail I needed to go above and beyond up at work. Priscilla’s Walmsley’s extensive experience is conveyed well in the book and has proven to be a great resource.
Rating: 4 / 5
I teach Java for a living, and this is clearly one of the best book for understanding web services using Java. It does an outstanding job of explaining many of the examples using Sun Java web services apis and it includes examples for using axis, weblogic etc. The microsoft .net interoperability and architecture case-study chapter makes it worth more.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author’s knowledge is unbelievable. I can’t imagine how one person could know a subject so deeply.
The tough part of SOA is that there are so many ways to do it: the tip of the iceberg is rpc or document, literal or encoded, wrapped or bare. And the deeper you get, the more architectural decisions there are e.g., java first or contract first, or “in the middle.” Hewitt gives you exactly the perspective you need to make these decisions.
He writes beautifully, too.
Great book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Web services is very interesting and it is the most talked topic in software development field. I have purchased two books on Web services and this one was the most comprehensive and got right to the point on how to build Java webservices (using Weblogic, Axis, JWSDP), and also shows to how consume them using even Microsoft .NET. This book has an excellent real-world case study which walksthrough how to develop and deploy complete web services with all Java API components showing all Web services components (SOAP, WSDL and UDDI) working together. This book is an excellent companion for Java developers who wish to develop web services using JWSDP, Axis and Weblogic.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve just seen this book and am pleased with the focus and attention to detail. Beyond the useful framework to get up to speed with web services, you can see the details that tells you the authors know what they are doing. If you are building Web Services and using Java tools–which you should be doing!–this book is what you need.
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book to be very insightful and perfect for my situation. Which is to have an overview on the various technologies as they may apply to the electronic security industry. Prior to having this book, I found myself coming back to the office to Google various technologies, now I feel that I at least have heard of and even understand (although mostly on the surface) many of these concerns clients bring up. I found the book especially suited for taking a subject that I am not particularly interested in and making it easy to comprehend while injecting enough humor to make an otherwise relatively dry subject funny.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you want one book that describes HOW TO BUILD real world Java Web services applications successfully, then this is it. I’ve read a number of related books that describe many aspects of Java APIs Web services and have always been left wanting, how to put all the WEBSERVICES BUILDING BLOCKS together using Java APIs. This is the ONLY JAVA WEBSERVICES BOOK which I read so far which demonstrates a WEB SERVICES ARCHITECTURE with all components together with working code.
I am sure Java developers and architects will all get value out of this book because it provides the working content for building Web services using the J2EE platform by walking through the Web services development from architecture, design, implemention and deployment. Some of the key features of this book, you will learn and demonstrate are:
- Building Web services from J2EE components
- Explore the JAX APIs – JAX-RPC, JAXM, SAAJ and JAXR with examples.
- Explore Java Web services interoperability with Microsoft .NET.
- Learn to build a real world Web services, putting all the JAX APIs together.
- Learn how to implement security for Web services.
- Learn how to develop Web services using Sun JWSDP, Apache Axis, BEA Weblogic, Microsoft .NET and IBM Web services Security kit.
For my eyes, this book is a Java developer’s companion for building Web services but not an “Idiot’s Guide”. So don’t expect the book to teach you how to write the “Hello World” Java or teaching basics.
Rating: 5 / 5
With this edited tutorial covering all the parts of SOA Suite 11g (from BPEL, via Mediator, Rules, as well as Human Workflow – all the way to B2B and Oracle’s Service Bus) it’s by far the best way to get a head start into the fundamentals of the platform at unprecedented breath.
Heidi and her team have done a tremendous job to structure the labs and hands-on exercises in a didactic, explanatory way – with solutions all the way through. This way the book serves not just as a tutorial, but also as a reference bible when it comes to implementation of specific features and concepts.
Clemens Utschig-Utschig, Platform Architect, SOA Suite
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is the best resource for Exchange development, written by the developers who work on Exchange Web Services (EWS) this book is a must-have for any developer that is thinking about writing applications against Exchange. I can’t recommend it enough for the examples, in depth explanations, and entertaining writing
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book a great introduction into the technical relevant issues of SOA. The book in particular helped me get a head start when I pitched my research to a CTO of a major insurance company involved over the last 5 years in SOA evolution (after much groundwork, I was given two hours of his precious time to convince him that there is value in my research for his organization, and was expected to make an in-depth case for the relevance of my work to his SOA evolution effort). Because the book prepared me well, I could follow with ease all overview and detailed design discussion, and also contribute to the technical discussion, which significantly contributed to the success of the meeting. I warmly recommend the book to anyone who wants to get a head start into technical but also organizational aspects of SOA in organizations.
Rating: 5 / 5
I chose this book after reading the glowing reviews here at Amazon, hoping to use it as an introductory tutorial to XML. I was disappointed!
The writing style chosen by the author is terse, as if writing space is at a premium – and this for a book which is 600+ pages long. The examples are badly chosen in my opinion, and the explanation of basic concepts is presented in the style of a reference manual. Take for example the explanation of the NOTATION element attribute: “A notation type attribute contains the name of a notation declared in the document’s DTD… In theory, it could be used to associate types with particular elements, as well as limiting the types associated with the elements”.
At this stage, I gave up on this book and went instead to Hunter’s “Beginning XML”. Still, all wasn’t lost: I read a colleague’s copy, so at least I wasn’t out of pocket.
Rating: 2 / 5
I gave this book some harsh reviews three weeks ago. Doubt and uncertainty about my assessment crept in as I kept reading all the other glowing reviews. So I gave it another try. And I found out I was being unfair. The book is in fact worse than I originally thought. Its littered with childish diagrams and metaphors who do nothing but add to the page count. The font and spacing are also cleverly crafted to increment book mass rather than understanding. It is painful to read as the author dilutes his meager message with summaries and overviews and summaries of overviews. I cannot even tell if the book is accurate because the information contents are so slim as to take hours to extract the smallest sliver of knowledge. Readers looking for succinct, honest or well reasoned material will be sorely disappointed. I would recommend instead they look at “Enterprise SOA” by Krafzig et al.
Rating: 2 / 5
While the samples are straight-forward, to the point and easy to follow, the book doesn’t really provide enough under-the-cover view. Generally speaking, if you are looking for some insight into WS used with Google, eBay, FedEx, etc. this is a wonderful book.
If you are looking into information for things such as “using Axis for real-world WS”, this just scratches the surface.
However…
This book provided a wonderful set of quick, easy test setups for use against generic WS implementations (such as those provided in B2Bi software) for comparative results. The peer into the provider-specific details made it wonderful to have provide expected output and check the diffs on files.
Recommended for QA, unit testing, automated testing, etc.
Recommended for those interested in quick samples but not in a core understanding of the technologies.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is, as far as I know, the only full length treatment of XML in .NET/C# 2008. The author has an “advanced” text, but this is based on .NET/C# 2005. This current volume serves well as both an introduction as well as a solid reference text to the full range of XML operation and usage. Chapter coverage is:
Manipulating via DOM model
Reading and Writing XML Documents
XPath
Validation
XSLT
ADO.NET
Serialization
Web Services
SQL Server
Use in .NET Framework
Creating Services in Windows Communication Foundation
LINQ to SML
But, the introduction of LINQ to XML has a “2nd generation” approach to XML reading, writing and manipulation in the Framework. The current volume devotes one chapter at 32 pages to the topic — clear but relatively scant.
If you think you may want to use LINQ to XML, Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2008 (Windows.Net) offers an extended discussion at 150 pages — with an excellent compare and contrast with the DOM version. That provides a good analysis of the approach best for your tasks and a solid explanation of implementation.
Rating: 4 / 5
The book is trying to incorporate lots of stuff, in the process confusing the programmers. I have lots of experience with VB and ASP and the reason I bought this book was because I thought that I can improve upon my internet skills and also because I understood that XML was a relatively easy technology to learn. But the author in this book is just introducing the programmer to various xml related technologies without explaining clearly what is for what and what is deemed as useful for average programmer.
Maybe I was confused when I bought this book!!
Rating: 1 / 5
By far one of the best XML books on the market today!!
As professionals, time is money. Why buy an XML book that’s 400+ pages when you can learn XML the fast, easy and enjoyable way? if you want a comprehensive reference guide read the W3C Specs, If I want to learn XML read this book!
J.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve just seen this book and am happy with the focus and the attention to detail. Beyond the useful framework to get up to speed with web services, you can see the details that tells you the authors know what they are doing. If you are building Web Services and using Java tools–which you should be doing!–this book is what you need.
Whether your interest is in programming Web Services, in using technologies like XML or SOAP, or just in understanding why Web Services are generating so much excitement, I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have been using Carey’s book for the last 3 times I have taught XML at the community college level. I have reviewed numerous books on the market that either are too ethereal or are based on a programming environment or developer-based rather than just XML the Technology. While I use a mix of the supplied (by Course) and my own material, some students seem to bash Course books as though it is a foregone conclusion that the material will be bad.
I have found that if a student applies themselves to the material presented they get a great deal out of it. XML is non-trivial and must be pursued with an eye on detail. Unfortunately, many students don’t seem to want to develop that.
The people who have reviewed this book and bashed it–come up with a better alternative that is simple enough for even a newbie developer AND is not programming-based. If you know of one I’m all ears.
By the way, I have no relationship to Course Technology or the author Carey.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book in the hopes of learning some of the problems that my company might encounter as we launch down the web services path along with the rest of the computer industry. My searches on the internet for this kind of information resulted mostly in about 90% positive comments about web services (which made me suspicious) and 10% incomprehensible ranting. This book certainly delivers comprehensive analysis that doesn’t come off as too positive or overly critical either (after all, if web services were really bad, then why would everyone be using them?)
While I found the book pretty funny, be warned – some of the humor is a little adult-oriented. If you’re a hard core religious type or don’t like edgy humor, the book probably isn’t for you. It’s definitely not your average computer book.
Rating: 4 / 5
I can truly say that Thomas Erl is probably one of very few that truly understands Web services and SOA. His books (both of them) are an architects companion when it comes to coming up with an enterprise-wide solution. Thomas depicts the pro’s and con’s of each approach and gives the reader an insight into what a Service-Oriented Architecture can bring to the picture.
“Of the many books that cover Web services and SOA, Service-Oriented-Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services will certainly go down in history as one of the best. It’s the only book of its kind that covers the latest and the greatest Web services protocols.”
Rating: 5 / 5
For anyone new to cloud computing, what it is, how to assess it suitability to your environment, challenges you need to consider, thought process to assist in making some crucial decisions – this is it. The first few chapters provides a good deal of information on the aspects to consider on whether or not clouds is for your organization. If cloud is suitable for your environment, the second set of chapters outlines a through process driven by SOA, particulars on what is/not cloud material etc. Great book on this subject.
Rating: 5 / 5
i’m very disappointed after reading the book. the contents were “OK” and explained technical details; however, it completely lacks why you would ever use web services, etc. so, if you are already using web services, this book might be for you. Nevertheless, if you are looking for answers what web services really are(e.g. when to use them, etc.), this book doesn’t provide the answers. Save your money.
Rating: 1 / 5
I wish it was more practical with better scenarios to guide architects through schema and business object definitions, gotchas and more. It gives areas to think about such as Project Managers roles, this is valuable. It could be better if updated… for example how do some of the new frameworks for persistence or distributed transactions fit?
Rating: 3 / 5
This author does a terrific job of examining all aspects of XML when coding in a C# project. I had a project in which using XML made great sense so I bought this book to answer my questions and get up to speed quickly which happened. His examples work and are well explained. Great job!
Rating: 5 / 5
Hansen offers the serious and experienced java programmer a way to learn Java Web Services, based on Java EE 5, which is probably the most heavily used version right now. (Version 6 has just come out and the book’s code should easily run under it.)
The bulk of the text essentially works through very detailed examples using JWS and associated (recent) standards like JAXB 2. The gist is to be able to write java code that can take XML output from some Web Service out there on the net, and let you composite it into another Web Service. It’s still not trivial to do. The code fragments assume a working knowledge of several current standards. Hansen is correct when he says that this is much easier than it would have been just a few years ago. The recent upgrades to java and the standards make this possible. But keep in mind that easier does not necessarily mean simple.
One passage in the text might appeal to those hapless enough to have dealt with XSLT. Several years ago, XSLT was promoted as the method to transform one XML representation to another. Several books have been written about this topic. But (bitter) experience has shown that XSLT is a remarkably cumbersome and obtuse way of doing things. What Hansen demonstrates is that JAXB 2 can be used in place of XSLT. Seems much more straightforward. Though to be fair, more practise will be needed doing this, to see if it holds true for other XML transformations.
Rating: 4 / 5
A lot of the books I’ve seen on web services are either too low level or too high level. This one was just about right. It presented just the facts you needed to know and explained why you would do this. Very concise and to the point.
Rating: 4 / 5
If you’re ready to propel your enterprise into the next technological realm – if you’re interested in architecting an enterprise that is agile enough to respond to rapidly changing business drivers – if you’re ready for a revolution in traditional approaches to technology innovation, then this book is the light in what has been a somewhat obscure tunnel. Author Melvin Greer gives a timely, insightful, and easy to grasp roadmap for leveraging SOA, and more specifically web services-based SOA, to realize dramatic improvement in interoperability, scalability, flexibility, reusability and the all important cost efficiency.
Rating: 5 / 5
Not a good book for academic study or indstry practice. 500+ pages, most of them are useless talking :< Don’t waste time here.
Rating: 1 / 5
SOA design patterns is a well-structured and easy-to-understand book. I highly recommend this book to all practitioners of SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
There’s no question that HTML is neat. It tells a web browser how to display text in a way that the writer desired. But, and it’s a very big BUT, if you want to go to a web site and get the page, and then extract some data from that page into your own program, you have a problem. The answer is XML.
This page you are reading now has the title of the book on it. The title is in bigger, bolder type. How would you go about extracting the title? It clearly has some kind of HTML commands around it. But they could be bold, strong, em, h1, h2, etc. You’d have to know exactly what the program was putting out and then expect that it never would change.
If it were in XML it would say something like [title]title goes here[/title] (in reality thesquare brackets are angle brackets, just like HTML). You would know exactly what to seach for as the delimiters of the title itself. This is, of course a simplified example, but you get the idea.
This book, typical of an O’Reilly book is professionally written by and for professionals. If it’s your task to begin outputting data in XML, this is the essential reference book you’ll want on your desk.
Rating: 5 / 5
Good news! If you are an IT leader, developer, or architect, or a non-technical person for whom IT subjects are an important part of your work, this book is for you. I highly recommend it.
The book is written based on reality and in-depth experience rather than hype, buzz words, or the latest technological “flavor of the month.” While accepting the reality of the Cloud, as the author puts it, “[this] is a book promoting good architecture practices by leveraging the best from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing.” I agree wholeheartedly with this depiction. If you have to buy only one book on Cloud computing or its marriage with SOA, this is it!
David Linthicum, a renowned author and thought leader on the subject, is handing us vital knowledge about Cloud computing, all in one concise package. In addition, the informal writing style of the author makes the information more accessible to a wide range of readers. The more you read and learn about the subjects of Cloud computing and SOA , in general, the more you will realize that this book is an invaluable resource, whether this is your first book on the subject or you already have a stack of related books.
Just as the clouds in our planet’s atmosphere are everywhere to a varying degree, right now, whether you are aware of it or not, Cloud computing is also everywhere in our computational life to a varying degree. We are only in the beginning of this computing Renaissance. I think that, just as in the actual history of the Renaissance, the changes in the IT world through Cloud computing will not be uniform across all markets. Some will benefit from it immensely, while others will lag behind. The knowledge handed to the reader through this book will help you to focus better and position you to take advantage of Cloud computing and SOA more quickly. As correctly pointed out by the book, in order to take full advantage of Cloud computing, we need architecture and discipline inside of the enterprise, such as SOA.
I agree with the author’s description of his book that, “This is more than just a book that defines some technology; this book defines a class of technology as well as approaches and strategies to make things work within your enterprise.” With this book and its key knowledge, you can sling-shot your efforts and seize the moment. The alternative is to go solo and, through trial and error, maybe get there eventually, after losing time and opportunities.
If you miss this book, you put yourself at greater risk of missing out on opportunities that are waiting for you out there.
Rating: 5 / 5
SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility is a fantastic book which shows how any service-oriented architecture project can be run more predictably and productively, decreasing cost and increasing ROI. The architects and project managers in charge of any significant SOA project should know the material in this book.
The book is written by four very knowledgeable SOA practitioners at IBM (which also explains why it’s published by IBM Press). Books written by multiple authors often read as independent chapters that don’t flow as a book, but these authors have collaborated well to produce a consistent whole. They have distilled their knowledge of how to manage SOA projects into what is really two books in one: 1) A model for managing SOA projects via 2) A process for performing SOA projects. The latter is based on tasks which produce work products, specific concrete deliverables which make project management much more straightforward. The latter half of Chapter 3 is a catalog of governance work product types, and Chapter 4 catalogs service development work product types. These form the basis for the SOA governance model described in Chapter 5, which details step-by-step tasks in the processes for governing the development of SOA applications, tasks which create the work products described previously.
I enjoyed all the touches of simple, practical advice spread throughout the book. One example is “Our experience has been that establishing a dedicated SOA CoE [Center of Excellence] is one of the most important organizational changes the governance planning team can make.” (p. 237) Another example is the sections titled “What Distinguishes the SOA Winners?” and “Antipatterns: Common SOA Pitfalls.” (pp. 43-50) Almost every section begins with a quotation that has nothing to do with SOA governance and yet usually illustrates the section quite nicely. For example, the section on “Governance Mechanisms” (p. 33) beings with this quote attributed to Colin Powell: “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”
No book is perfect, nor is this one. Chapter 6 on managing the lifecycle is not as strong and badly needs more copyediting. For example, after doing a nice job of distinguishing between processes and tasks (p. 268), other parts of the chapter start distinguishing between tasks and what are sometimes called processes but sometimes called services. I’d also quibble that they focus overly much on whether operations can be automated since it’s also valid for a task in a process to be a human task. Nevertheless, these complaints are minor in what overall is a collection of very useful information.
(Disclaimer: I, like the authors of this book, am employed by IBM.)
Rating: 5 / 5
Simple to understand and readable. I like the book ir recommend it to the software development community. The introduction is great and the material is well structured i also think that the book should become a text book for graduate students
Rating: 5 / 5
Editor Jeff Rafter contributes more information to this field than any other person on Earth. I think they should have named this book “XML Perfected, By: Jeff Rafter and other anonymous people–that, while not as brilliant, are passable.” Hand him a lollipop and call him Uncle Einstein.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have read a number of books on SOA, but this book is by far the broadest and most practical. Written by a practitioner of SOA, the author covers real world implementation challenges and best practices.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a must for all developers that want to benefit from the new Exchange Web Services protocols. MSDN documentation is not that great, but the book explains the internals, data types and procedures, giving clear examples. You can’t go wrong with it, especially when developing using .NET
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is a great read and furthers the understanding of what Service Orientation is actually about. As a side issue, the book is beautifully composed.
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s not a business book. It doesn’t cover the reasons for using the various technologies well enough for that. The information provided is the kind of simple overview you can get from just surfing the web on these subjects.
It’s not a technical book. The details are too sparse for this.
It’s not a humor book, though it tries to be.
The thing it does best is try to mimic, or at least bring to mind, successful creative efforts (note the lookalike cover).
Go find something from O’Reilly instead.
Rating: 1 / 5
Very useful book for a technology and business consultant. Look forward to the next edition!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book was fantastic and allowed me to get up and running on a web services project for work very quickly.
While I still needed a few internet resources to complete the project, I would not have been able to get far along without this book!
Rating: 5 / 5
My problem with this book is that I was hoping it would concentrate more on just XML Schema, something I think most people would prefer. Of course, how I am qualified to make that kind of statement is beyond me
But here is my reasoning: A fairly large portion of the book covers DTDs, RELAX NG, and Schematron. DTDs, while ubiquitous, are being supplanted by XML Schema. Usage of RELAX NG and Schematron are, by the book’s own admission, not widespread. So it seems that all three of these technologies could have been admitted, as were many other XML-related technologies (XSLT, XPath, etc.)
In addition, I feel the regular-expression-like inclusions should have been omitted. These include something referred to as Productions in one part of the book and Contents in another. Maybe good for hard-core CS people, but pretty much useless for those of us who just want to work with XML Schema. An ideal replacement would have been some examples illustrating sample usage of various elements and attributes.
All in all, the descriptions accompanying the elements and attributes are pretty good. Unfortunately, that accounts for only about one-third of the book. But it only costs $10 and it is small, so maybe it’s worth it.
Rating: 2 / 5
Since all other reviews are very positive, I’m here to offer a different opinion.
I’ve had this book for over a year now, and I barely use it. Each time I attempt to find something useful in it, the information is scattered over the entire book making it extremely difficult to understand.
For example, right now I’m looking up the “ref” attribute, and according to the index, it appears on 7 different locations throughout the book, each portion shorter than 1 page. Also, I have seen many tables scattered throughout with exact same information, or one or two differing field values, making it very confusing to understand which table is doing what.
And at over 500 pages long, there is a large amount of filler information in this book.
Is this book “definitive”? It looks like it is. Is this book usable? Absolutely not. This is one of the worst investments I’ve made in computer books.
And there is a place about strings in the book where it differs from the official W3C specs.
Rating: 2 / 5
The book is good for the people who want to start building services right away with Axis2 Implementation. I read only few chapters before I switched to web logic services so this book didn’t help much. But It definitely gives you all the screenshots to quickly use Axis2. There is a feature called Code Generator which can be used inside eclipse. Using this tool you can generate stubs skeletons etc using Axis2. I folllowed the step given in the book but couldn’t install it or use it. Not sure who to blame.
My advice – Buy it if you want to build services usign Axis2 Quickly.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is a fantastic resource when learning to work with XML within the SQL Server.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you are going to write Hello World type web services then simple to the point books are ok. If you are going to write web services for Fortune 500 companies then it becomes important to understand all the details and this is where the book falls short.
If you are casual about the topic, then I highly recommend it, otherwise purchase a serious book such as Java Web Services Architecture.
Rating: 3 / 5
Good news! If you are an IT leader, developer, or architect, or a non-technical person for whom IT subjects are an important part of your work, this book is for you. I highly recommend it.
The book is written based on reality and in-depth experience rather than hype, buzz words, or the latest technological “flavor of the month.” While accepting the reality of the Cloud, as the author puts it, “[this] is a book promoting good architecture practices by leveraging the best from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud computing.” I agree wholeheartedly with this depiction. If you have to buy only one book on Cloud computing or its marriage with SOA, this is it!
David Linthicum, a renowned author and thought leader on the subject, is handing us vital knowledge about Cloud computing, all in one concise package. In addition, the informal writing style of the author makes the information more accessible to a wide range of readers. The more you read and learn about the subjects of Cloud computing and SOA , in general, the more you will realize that this book is an invaluable resource, whether this is your first book on the subject or you already have a stack of related books.
Just as the clouds in our planet’s atmosphere are everywhere to a varying degree, right now, whether you are aware of it or not, Cloud computing is also everywhere in our computational life to a varying degree. We are only in the beginning of this computing Renaissance. I think that, just as in the actual history of the Renaissance, the changes in the IT world through Cloud computing will not be uniform across all markets. Some will benefit from it immensely, while others will lag behind. The knowledge handed to the reader through this book will help you to focus better and position you to take advantage of Cloud computing and SOA more quickly. As correctly pointed out by the book, in order to take full advantage of Cloud computing, we need architecture and discipline inside of the enterprise, such as SOA.
I agree with the author’s description of his book that, “This is more than just a book that defines some technology; this book defines a class of technology as well as approaches and strategies to make things work within your enterprise.” With this book and its key knowledge, you can sling-shot your efforts and seize the moment. The alternative is to go solo and, through trial and error, maybe get there eventually, after losing time and opportunities.
If you miss this book, you put yourself at greater risk of missing out on opportunities that are waiting for you out there.
Rating: 5 / 5
I am not a web developer, I have bought several other aws related scripts and I always have been able to implement them on my websites. I bought this book in hope of getting more control over display of products on my website.
(…)
Some interesting exercises at the end of chapter, but no hints or working examples.
There is no after sales support for assistance with customization of the examples. Usually autors create their forums where users can help each other, but we don’t even have a forum for this book.
Lots of information , it might be a good book for an expert Web Developer.
I will be returning this book.
(…)
Rating: 1 / 5
The book is excellent for an experienced Java developer. Some JAX-WS practical knowledge is almost a must as the book dives into very details and you would get lost if you didn’t work with JAX-WS (Metro) before. But that’s exactly what I needed. Definitely recommended. I don’t know any better JAX-WS book so far and so comprehensive.
The only downside could be that it’s an early bird and thus is based on first GlassFish/Metro implementation (JAX-WS 2.0) and doesn’t cover WebSphere web services or any extensions going beyond JAX-WS. But hey, that is a story for a different book.
Rating: 5 / 5
The thing that I like about this book is that it is very practical and real about SOA Governance. A lot of the articles and books that I’ve read on this subject kind of talk about SOA Governance in theory, or take an attempt at describing a fictional companies governance, but don’t really get down to the level of detail that I’m looking for. This one does.
In no particular order, here are the things that helped me understand the nuts and bolts of SOA Governance:
1. An SOA Governance Paradigm (model) that gave me a good mental grasp of how to think about governance – standards, policies, mechanisms, metrics, procedures, and how these entities relate to the governed entity.
2. A framework for SOA Governance that focused on 4 domains and 26 capabilities. This allowed me to consider all aspects of governance and to rate governance for its current and desired maturity and then create a heat map of needs to guide the governance transition plan.
3. I really liked the section on `suitability considerations’. We all know that there is no one size fits all governance pattern and the 9 levels of governance discussed just really hit home for me.
4. The mapping of business considerations such as `Sell more by outgrowing competitors’ and `Cost less by reducing operating expenses’ to the governance capabilities was something that our business guys found interesting and actually made them more interested in SOA Governance.
5. The concept of `Service Factory’ was an eye opener and the usage of governance to automate the service factory really made sense. It gave me a good talking point when dealing with management in the development groups. The information on governance control points was very specific and helpful.
6. Did I say this book is specific? There is a long list and description of governance work products. While not all of them were relevant to our situation, it nevertheless caused me to think about and make explicit decisions instead of not doing something out of sheer ignorance.
7. The information on governance organizations and roles and responsibilities is alone worth the price of the book.
8. The case study didn’t cover everything, but it gave me enough real world situations to bring home the points that were being made in each chapter.
9. Lots of interesting quotes to spice things up – my favorite from Abe Lincoln – `Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe’.
Rating: 5 / 5
Hurray. At last. A slender book that tries to show you the essence of Web Services, in as simple a fashion as possible. Unlike much larger texts on this subject, Iverson eshews a comprehensive approach. Instead, he strives to describe the gist of WS.
He gives this substance by showing how to hook into the WS APIs published by eBay, Google, Amazon and FedEx, to build a composite WS. This modular approach to constructing from independent sources is the driving force behind WS. The code examples are necessarily verbose. But not really that intricate. Here is your chance to be demystified about WS. Now if you find afterwards that you still want to continue, then you’re probably ready, and need, one of those other texts.
Rating: 5 / 5
Wow – what a waste! It’s one thing to waste the money but it’s all the more painful when you also waste time reading just to realize you wasted money on a book.
Funny enough wikipedia has been more helpful than this book > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
Rating: 1 / 5
If you’re a fan of the Thomas Erl SOA series, you won’t be disappointed with his latest installment. This book is packed with real-world design patterns and is a great resource for SOA architects and developers alike.
Rating: 4 / 5
I thought this book was insightful and it really was pretty funny. It has clear explanations of many technologies that include not only strengths and weaknesses, but also the mistakes and misuses. I haven’t been able to find this type of information from other sources. I found myself chuckling a fair amount too.
Rating: 5 / 5
Not that dated, you will get the background that is behind all the hype and you will get some hands on. Not a first choice but it is a solid review and a book I still keep on my desk. Get this and of course one of the newer titles. The new ones may be hyping something that isn’t going to happen, at least with this one you will find most of the topics still are the cornerstones of web services. There is gold in them there hills, and those hills are strewn with books discarded too soon as old. Many explain things very well and offer knowledge. Nice book.
Rating: 4 / 5
SOA: PRINCIPLES OF SERVICE DESIGN is another example of Thomas Erl writing a book that explains in easier to understand terms the world of SOA. In my opinion, the book kept the information basic enough for a beginner and advanced enough to keep the interest of more SOA knowledgeable individuals. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of his next book. I highly recommend not only this book but his series!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is wonderful…. so good I felt I had to stop reading and spread the word…. back to XML!
Rating: 5 / 5
This books has all what you need to know about XML, simple nice and all examples are in JAVA.
I’m using this book as a text book for my students in Advance web development course
Rating: 5 / 5
Arrived in time == fact;
“as new” condition == true;
5 stars == is my take.
I found the book helpful and useful.
Let me rephrase it: I could not find a better coverage of the subject elsewhere.
I wish us to see more on the subject (XPath, XQuery) both:
- the best practices (apart from particular DB engine);
- what are the choices out there: XML native DB including.
Rating: 5 / 5
I have several books on Web Services. This is the one I use the most. It needs to be updated. Web Services is still evolving too quick for books to keep up. I cannot wait for the second edition of this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a great book in that the author provides comprehensive coverage of a complicated subject, and does it in clear, concise and understandable language. The book should be a promary resource for programmers. I look forward to more contributions from this author.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is one of the finest book from Thomas Erl. The diagrams are colored and beautify as well.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is possibly the worst book ever written on any topic. If you want to spend hours frustrated in front of the computer trying to get the poorly written tutorials to work, then by all means by this book. It’s a shame it is even printed on paper. Oxygen-providing trees were chopped down needlessly to make this book. Such a waste for no beneficial result. I only give this one star because zero stars was not an option.
Rating: 1 / 5
Mr. Greer’s book is a quick read and blueprint for individuals and businesses seeking a method for delivering value through web services. It focuses on delivering value to customers as a trusted advisor; provides ways of reducing their overall costs; and reveals new ideas for transforming customers’ business through web services and service oriented architecture. It is a must read!
Rating: 5 / 5
I think this is one of the best web services book that I have read. It does not give extra information and explains only what is needed. Anyone can deploy there web service and start experimenting with it in no time using this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
One of the most clear-headed presentations of SOA concepts. It also deals with some of SOA’s difficult problems (versioning, governance, incompatible data representations, etc.) that are often ignored by other books. It is a book that focuses on concepts and architecture. Other books are better suited for learning the nuts and bolts technical implementation details.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you had to time or money for just one book on Web Services, this would be it. The book truly delivers on different perspectives namely, business, training, architecture, development, operational and “future”. You start by learning enough to convince your boss (or clients, in my case) of the benefits of using your approach and then proceed to master the whole XML based implementations as well. Dense read, though: there is enough material in each chapter to cover an entire book. If you are a java programmer, it makes it even better, most probably because the book came out in 2003 when Microsoft .NET was still pretty clueless about all this web services stuff anyway. Even the J2EE world is way ahead of the book in terms of implementation. Still an excellent read, so my only request would be…a second, updated edition!
Rating: 5 / 5
Sorry for the bad pun, but this is a great book. If you’re looking for comprehensive, easy to understand book on SOA, this is it.
After sitting in on one of Thomas Erl’s seminar’s, this book provided a great follow-up, providing an in-depth coverage of SOA computing concepts and benefits.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers the topic of web services, primarily from a Java perspective. It assumes a familiarity with Java and XML so as to be able to follow the code examples. The chapters are as follows: Welcome To Web Services, Inside The Composite Computing Model, SOAP: The Cornerstone Of Interoperability, SOAP-RPC, SOAP-Faults, and Misunderstandings, Web Services Description Language, UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration, JAX-RPC and JAXM, J2EE and Web Services, Web Services Interoperability, and Web Services Security.
Review
If you read the chapter headings and say “What does THAT mean?”, then you probably have a reasonability good idea as to whether this book is for you. As stated in the preface, this is not a “For Dummies” treatment of web services. While it covers all the different technologies that make up web services, it does it at a pretty high level of detail with a lot of code samples in Java.
The good thing here is that many of the examples are given using the Apache Tomcat server as the mechanism for processing the request. This is great in that you can download that software for free from the Apache site. This book doesn’t go into detail as to how Tomcat is set up and configured, however. You need to work through that on your own. Once you get to that point, you can use Tomcat to play with the examples that are used throughout the book. While they can look complex and intimidating, you can learn a lot from them.
As a Notes/Domino developer, I learned a lot by reading the book. Am I ready to start developing web services? Not hardly. But I do understand more of the concepts behind how they work. Since web services often use servlets to process requests, Notes/Domino 5 doesn’t fit the traditional picture of the technology. But since web services usually involve SOAP XML statements sent to a server, there’s no reason you couldn’t program a web service in Domino as a web agent that runs when a user submits a web page or runs a URL that activates a server agent. The processing is done and then returned to the client as an XML page. Once you read and digest the basic concepts behind it all, it all starts to come together.
Conclusion
If you are a Notes/Domino developer who is trying to understand “web services”, this book could be useful. The book gets progressively more complex and detailed, so you may find yourself skimming at the end. If you are to the point of being ready to run an implementation of a servlet and SOAP engine (like Tomcat), this book will help you get started with your understanding of web services.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been reading this book on a Kindle and it works but it is not excellent. The structure of the book is good you get explanation of XML and how it works. The problem I feel I would like to have a more “concentrated” book. in this book XML XSD XSLT etc should be explained but the language in the book is as it is in many computer books a little bit to talkative. I would preffer a book that focus on SQL Servers implementation of XML and not in a half stringent way tries to explain XSD et al.
Reading in a Kindle I would like to have more links, better pictures (Kindle support for zooming in picture is not good), a more compact book where .query is explained in just one place.
I recommend the book but there are areas that can be improved.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book has got a decent content about XML. But, most pages have been added to technologies that aren’t being used much and just adds bulk to the book. A little rhetoric and not always concise to the point; but can live with it. Over all a good reference book. 3 Stars.
Rating: 3 / 5
Rarely a computer science book can be so entertaining to read while providing very instructive content.
The “most common mistakes” sections on each subject is worth the price of the book.
Rating: 5 / 5
And yet this book covers every aspect of web service development utilizing perl. As a long time user of the original Frontier::RPC2 module, things have come a long way, and with that greater complexity, the concepts have grown in scope considerably. This IS the book that you want to read if you REALLY want to understand SOAP and XML-RPC. From the XML DTD’s to implementation code (either standalone applications or utilizing mod_perl) this book covers everything in between. In all it is a welcome addition to the O’Reilly family of Perl books.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was amazed to see how well this book explain the concept of Spatial Data and all different techniques of loading and transforming XML from diverse format and systems. It shows so many examples at a very granular level. This book is a “must read” for everyone that has any interest on learning great powerful XML techniques on SQL Server 2008. It is definitely great!
Rosa Lopez
MS Information Systems
Rating: 5 / 5
Written on 08/30/2005 I returned to delete the original review,
because it occurred to me that the starring average will pop
higher. This was a regret from my original post, my first on
Amazon. When I arrived, I found another reader of the book had
received rebuttle.
The following is the suggestion that caused me to respond today.
It is suggested that this reader simply wanted free support.
Is this why he or she purchased this book?
The effect fails to follow the reason inferred.
Listen closely: these are patrons that have purchased this book,
and are potential future customers, employers, or clients.
There is nothing more public than the web; a published book comes
close second. In any public undertaking, criticism occurs.
I am often publicly vocal. It follows that I am also often
publicly criticised.
This is a natural tendancy of any environment where one
individual attempts to influence another individual or group.
This is likely one of the effects of self-publishing through Lulu
Press: because of the absence of guidance from a publisher or an
editor, there is no one to tell you which bullets to bite.
Be careful of childishness.
Rather than the current theme of reaction, instead: listen.
You have a reader wondering why there isn’t a support forum on
the book’s homepage. He is right, it should exist. For technology
books it is standard fare.
You will see why once you create it. Let readers support other
readers and give each other more ways to use this book, or any
monograph you create in the future.
Attention is brought to the fact that this reader is not a web
developer, and so could not harvest what real value the book
offered.
I grant that the book’s title includes the words, “Web
Developer,” although, another title including the words,
“Beginning with PHP and Amazon Web Services” or “Cookbook” is the
real opportunity implicit in this reader’s statements.
Possibly another good idea is a “free” Primer Preface in the form
of a downloadable PDF from the book’s home page, that would not
only prime this reader, but also any other potential readers with
the same level of experience, and give other potential readers
with greater experience a taste of the work, whetting their
appetite for the potential value in this book…
All of this said, is it notable that no defense is attempted to
any rebuttle regarding my own review stamped with my own REAL
NAME(TM) and unchanged entries? Is why apparent?
=====
The text that follows has been added on 06/19/2005 and is
unchanged since.
This was my first review. I came back to see if the review had
been added to find a response note by the author, and I was
surprised. This led me to think of the effect on the writer. I
have no intention to unduly effected the future sales of the book
– not by a longshot. I am completely glad that it is available.
It is unfortunate that this was the first review; it slammed the
starring average. I am sure that it will improve as other readers
consume the book.
Let me apologize some of my biases: I was a user of the original
AmazonLib as well as have used and tested a number of other
software libraries and API dealing with the Amazon Web Services.
That said, I was led to the book by the release of AmazonLib 2
(probably uncommon as opposed to searching on this site).
(…)
I bought the book to give a vote of confidence to the writer and
hopefully learn from his experience. And his experience shouldn’t
be understated; he is one of the earliest adopters of the Amazon
Web Services platform that does their work in PHP. I was quite
satisfied with this aspect of the book.
For instance, the deft handling of explaining the BrowseNode,
Amazon’s seemingly completely nonsensical array of categorization
– any walk through Amazon’s dedicated forums will expose many
contributors scrambling over “What happened with * ?” and
BrowseNode usually replaces the star in more than half of the
cases. The book goes to show that it is just about as nosensical
as you had thought, but shows some ways at combating this with
cross-referencing products and categories.
Another example of experience in the book deals with making
requests to the Amazon image servers for variations as well as
adding more fine-grained requests for dynamic content such as the
“percent-off” or “look-inside” stamps. This is something that
isn’t in the Amazon Web Services documention, and so is a great
example of what can be used in the book without resorting to a
mess of harrowing trial and error, because the author has done so
for you.
The same goes for tips on creating Amazon AssociateIDs on the
worldwide Amazon sites, when you are even unable to read the
language – how many people do you, the reader, know that can
speak 5+ human languages, plus program in PHP or write templates
in XSLT? I have met none. Again, this is an example of the
author’s experience dutifully put into the pages of this book.
To clarify my criticism regarding application inflexibility, the
coding presented in the book may be modified – just as any ideas
can be modified to new needs – but a many may find that they are
quite difficult to customize as the there are some very specific
references to the needs of the appliation at hand. (Truthfully, I
wouldn’t wish weeding through 4-9 dimensional arrays on my
enemies — …Well, come to think of it, on a few enemies I
would – but they probably already do so.)
This leads to my criticism regarding the absence of a catalogue
of returned elements. This was possibly quite unfair – but it is
worth noting that in previous versions of the Amazon Web Services
there were far fewer options with returning data to your
applications – this flexibility is useful, as bandwidth for
unwanted extra data costs everyone money and time – it also comes
at the cost of far more complexity. While in past versions of
the Amazon Web Services you had few options of return (say two,
light and heavy) you now have *numerous combinations of 36
response groups. Some of these may not be used together, while
others can be combined.
*To oversimplify – that is, assuming the response groups could
all be used together in any context; please note that they can’t
be used this way – that is Factorial of 36 minus 1 possible
combinations, or 3.7199332678990121746799944815084e+41 possible
combinations.
Letting the details wash away — again, this is very simplified
— 41 zeros after any number of scenarios ultimately points to
a programmer’s worst nightmare to support them all. Think of a
musician, now give that musician a piece of music that asks them
to concurrently play all possible notes on their instrument for 2
hours straight — then, watch them helplessly faint.
I was hoping for help with this new complexity, and there IS
some. However, it wasn’t in the format or depth for my own
purposes. This is as much a flaw in the Amazon Web Services still
having more in common how the information is created then
consumed, as my needs, the book’s content, an act of God, or
anything else.
The more pious readers will wonder, “What else is there?” My
answer is, “I’m not sure.” (Again, frame of reference coming into
play…)
What I do know, is that the content in this book attempts to
instruct on dealing with the Amazon Web Services from the
standpoint of an XSLT templater, a PHP4 *and* PHP5 developer,
make use of integral libraries to PHP for parsing XML, pre-PHP5
staples such as NuSoap, makes use of his own XML parser, deals
with handling data from other counties — unfamiliar encoding
included, as well as attempts to provide some good habits from an
experiential standpoint in it’s pages.
This is quite a bit to do in any book, and this is done
relatively well – understandably spread thin, but done well all
the same.
As a last topic for this edited review, I would like to focus on
the overall value of the book. This is a book that needed to
exist. I am quite appalled that no other publisher has taken the
project on to date.
And why not? There are nearly a million current Amazon Associates
currently registered with Amazon, and more on the way. But, most
of them find limited success, and that is due to inability to
handle the technology with care, as well as inappropriate
application of the web services to users’ needs.
Granted, such a focused book wouldn’t likely hit a best-seller’s
list, but no technical book would do so… Well, save one, “My
System” by Aaron Nimzovitch. This is a chess book that was
confused with Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” pushing it’s sales to
best-seller levels. Funny, a little sad, but true. No other
technical book will ever be a best-seller. And considering those
circumstances, I would hope that there is never another one.
This is the *only* book that attests to this need at the time of
publication.
The book goes a long way to aid handling the web services in
better fashion, my original criticism was that it didn’t go the
entire distance with regard to handling the web services well.
The feature I felt was important would likely have added another
50 pages to the book, as well as another $5-$15 to the price.
It is likely that I wasn’t fair in bemoaning it.
Let me also mention price while the topic is at hand. This book
has 476 pages (including index) but still costs a extremely
affordable $15.
The content is quite good – particularly in light of it being a
first book for such a price. You will not find anything else that
does this as well – or at all.
For instance, the content-scant Friends of ED line will charge a
minimum of $50 for less
Rating: 3 / 5
A wonderfully concise book without the typically verbose pay-per-word variants the IT book market has too much of!
I’ll lend my copy to whichever customer needs to know the business value of SOA – AND whoever needs to realize NOW is the time to go ahead!
Rating: 5 / 5
A must have for all web developers.
Rating: 5 / 5
Its a great buy for any Java SOA Developer. It very well starts with the xml concepts explaining schema and other details and then gets into the webservices concepts, finally diving into BPEL and ESB stuff.
It does not cover detailed concepts for BPEL and ESB but gives a very good brief explanation of the topics and headstart for a developer to dive into these topics. Overall its a good buy for a person who wants to start from webservices and then start understanding SOA Concepts as it covers both the restful and SOAP based services concepts.
Rating: 4 / 5
Es injusto que alguien le pueda dar 1 estrella a este libro, porque es un texto muy bueno. Definitivamente está dirigido a un público diferente de aquellos que buscan cómo aprender algo en 10 minutos o 24 horas, no es ese tipo de literatura.
Es un libro para alguien que quiere entender cómo y porqué deben hacerse las cosas en los ambientes distribuidos y porque XML viene a ser un elemento fundamental en este tipo de arquitecturas. Obviamente al centrarse en estas explicaciones conceptuales da poco espacio para documentar código fuente(se puede bajar), que es lo que determinado público anda buscando.
Si Ud. esta interesado en entender la filosofia de los ambientes distribuidos y el papel que XML y los Web Service juegan, este libro es para Ud.
Rating: 5 / 5
Information in the book is great.
Author’s sarcastic tone of voice often mocks/belittles the ‘dumb reader’
“We will not describe this schema definition in great detail. By now, you should be familiar with schema constructs; if you need to review this material, please refer to Chapter 1.” pg. 375(ch 14)
“At this point you may be wondering ..how it knows what this message is requesting. From an intuitive standpoint, the answer to this question is that the…. pg 361
“If you examine the response message, again from an intuitive standpoint, you may notice the following points” pg 362
Rating: 3 / 5
full of nonsense in whole book.
For example, xml schemas chapter is from page 108 to 164 about 60 pages, but realy useful w3c xml schema only take less 8 pages, others, useless, forget them.
Hi my dear author,
you have a lot of work to do, from simple to complex, how can you just give a long example and finish. Do you know “learning” means ***FOCUSING ON CORE***
Rating: 2 / 5
Like the other Nutshell books in O’Reilly’s series, this too is designed to provide the most valuable information in the least space possible. Some people criticize the Nutshell series over this issue, but it is really the strong point of this book-it is designed to be used as a desktop reference. I have always liked the Nutshell book, and this one is no exception.
Again, this book isn’t designed to be a how-to, and O’Reilly doesn’t claim it as such. It’s designed as a desktop reference, which is really where this book shines. Java web service developers will find this a valuable addition to their library.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is not only powerful, but is a must have for anyone developing against Exchange Server either now or in the future. The explanations are both thorough as well as detailed and make it easy for those who have never written web services to get started. The examples are fantastic and complete and in no time at all I was able to get started. I would recommend this book to anyone, new programmers or experienced. Fantastic book!
Rating: 5 / 5
The other review book I received yesterday was XML Pocket Reference (3rd Edition) by Simon St. Laurent and Michael Fitzgerald. Depending on what you’re looking for, this may or may not the book for you…
Contents: Introduction; XML Structures; Document Type Definitions; W3C XML Schema; RELAX NG; Schematron; XML Specifications; Index
Admittedly, trying to cover “XML” in a single book is a daunting task. XML is made up of so many standards and technologies (XPath, XForms, XML Schema, etc.) that you either have to specialize your coverage area or be ready to publish a *really* heavy book. To their credit, the authors stripped out XSLT into it’s own pocket guide. That act keeps this particular book small enough to fit in your pocket and that’s good. But if you’re wanting information on XSLT and think this might be your book, forget it.
Next, the XML Structures and Document Type Definition chapters seemed to be a little confusing. There was something introduced that I had never heard of before… something called “Productions” followed by syntax that looked like regular expression language. Never having seen that term before in my XML reading, I went back to the introduction to see what the authors wanted to convey there. The only explanation was “As each structure is discussed, applicable productions from the XML 1.0 and 1.1 specs will be listed in the order in which they appear in the specs.” So, I still really don’t know what productions are, and I probably have to go to the specs to find that out. The description of each section in an XML document, like CDATA or declarations, was nice though.
The book starts to become really useful when you get into the XML Schema section. There they go into each of the elements along with each attribute that can be used with the element. This is the type of reference information I’d expect to see in a pocket guide. Something I can turn to quickly as a refresher for what parameters or attributes I can use with an element, or to gain a quick understanding of an element I haven’t seen before. This same structure is followed for the RELAX NG and Schematron schema languages, so the book will be helpful if you live in those worlds also.
Basically, I found the XML Pocket Guide to be a little “hit and miss”. If the title had been “XML Schema Pocket Guide”, I’d have felt like the book was pretty on target. Trying to call it the XML Pocket Guide seems to infer there’s a lot more in here than there actually is, and a buyer might get a copy and be highly disappointed in what it doesn’t cover. If you’re looking for schema info, you’ll love the book. If that’s a secondary reason for you to get the book, you might be disappointed.
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve just read this book. I don’t like to write any review (my English is still poor) and i wasn’t goint to, but saw previous
reviewer. That gay is from people who love a book such as “c++ for 10 minute”. This book is the most valuable for people who would like to know how to build distributed applications across inet boundaries, how to convert (forsee minimum changes at the begining of project) a desktop to a distributed application. The book makes you think, but not just cut-copy code. The examples are the most practicals I’ve ever seen. Actually they are patterns
of real applications. There is only 7-th (SOAP) chapter where I fell (I couldn’t build example). The most important chapters are 8 (Web Services) and 16 (Windows Form), you will learn how to reuse code using combination user and custom controls, then transform desktop to a distributed application, after then deploy it without client administration, finally autors show you how to join . Net client with java servlets.
Rating: 5 / 5
In this book, Linthicum illustrates, for today’s enterprise users, a step-wise approach for managing the convergence of SOA and Cloud Computing. For businesses looking for recommendations for leveraging Cloud Computing, Linthicum provides an understanding of various functions provided by the Cloud and how to use SOA to design for incorporating them into their IT strategy.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought the book thinking that book’s title will actually be expanded further in the book. Nope. After reading first few chapters, I felt like I went back 15 years in technology. I would recommend to read other SOA books (one by Thomas Erl is good). Planning to return the book.
Rating: 1 / 5
‘Pro PHP XML and Web Services’ by Robert Richards is a great book to help you learn your way around these technologies. Packing in over 900+ pages, this book gives a broad overview of the subject matter which is outlined here:
01. Introduction to XML and Web Services
02. XML Structure
03. Validation
04. XPath, XPointer, XInclude
05. PHP and XML
06. Document Object Model
07. SimpleXML
08. Simple API for XML
09. XMLReader
10. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
11. Effective and Efficient Processing
12. XML Security
13. PEAR and XML
14. Content Syndication: RSS and Atom
15. Web Distributed Data Exchange
16. XML-RPC
17. Representational State Transfer
18. SOAP
19. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
20. PEAR and Web Services
21. Other XML Technologies and Extensions
If you need a book that dives into the XML technology and doesn’t look back, this is a nice pickup that gets the job done. Lots of other Apress books I feel are a bit too long, but this book at over 900 pages I have less complaints about. It’s solidly written and a nice companion book to have on your bookshelf for anyone that programs with XML.
**** RECOMMENDED
Rating: 4 / 5
Stupidly I thought that if a book made it to a 2nd edition it must be good . . . but alas not so. I should have read the reviews first. In the end I learned more from Wikipedia than this book =(
Rating: 1 / 5
Josuttis does an excellent job in transferring his vast experience with SOA architecture to the reader in ways that allow you to take your previous knowledge of enterprise software and (finally) understand SOA to the point where you can guide a team as to whats important and not important and where the pitfalls are.
There are some initial chapters that have some confusing points specifically around what an ESB is or is not and whether its needed in a SOA. To cut a long story short, Josuttis is being initially abstract about what an ESB is which is confusing when we have very specific examples in the marketplace. When he says you need an ESB to implement a SOA I was confused until he explained that you need specific functionality that you might implement in an application server (as many have successfully) or buy an EAI product or buy an ESB. After that it was plain sailing in terms of understanding what to think about architecturally.
This book is far more practical and accessible than the Thomas Erl books and articles that I’ve read which left me wanting less abstraction and more specifics. In addition he also covers the soft skills side (not just the technical side) which is critical when making stategic changes to IT systems.
To reiterate, clearly a lot of painful experience has been distilled here and you would be crazy not to read this book to get that injection of experience in your team.
This is a book that will build your confidence as an architect faced with SOA tasks.
Rating: 5 / 5
easy to read ,and understand .I recommend this as one of the best books on web services for beginners
Rating: 5 / 5
As with all O’Reilly books there’s a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don’t force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what’s available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray’s RPC::XML modules (he’s also one of the authors). I’ve been fighting with getting the ’system.*’ handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.
Rating: 5 / 5
Great book on SOA governance and the considerations to make when establishing this for your organization. Written from a pragmatic viewpoint. I found this to be well laid-out and an enjoyable read (as much as the topic of SOA Governance will allow, anyway). Happy to have this in my personal library. Recommended!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book should be titled: “Vendor Oriented Software.”
The one thing that most people agree upon with SOA is that there is a lot of confusion. This book unfortunately adds to that confusion.
The second thing that most people agree upon is that the vendors of SOA related software can not help themselves but define SOA as best suites what they are selling.
Unfortunately, the authors of this book look at SOA from the Vendors perspective, as opposed to defining SOA from the perspective of the those that are actually using it as an efficient and effective means of empowering their enterprise architecture.
Given that SOA tooling is on a strong march to commoditization via open source there advice is rendered all the more irrelevant as software vendors increasingly cannot compete with the free army or best practices being applied in open source software.
All that aside, if you are really interested in learning SOA and not VOA, here is my suggestion of what to read and the order to read it in:
- Vendor agnostic introduction to the concepts >> Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell
- Intermediate review of the fundamentals >> SOA in Practice by Nicolai M. Josuttis
- Intermediate do it yourself with Open Source >> SOA Using Java Web Services by Mark Hansen
- Advanced enterprise review of the issues >> Any of the SOA books by by Thomas Erl
- Deep dive for doing it yourself at the nuts and bolts level >> Building Web Services by Steve Graham et al
Good luck!
Rating: 1 / 5
The book was in A+ condition, but the shipping was slow, no wonder though, since it was sendt to Norway from New Zealand. The book was thoroughly packed. The seller is highly recommended.
The book itself seems to just what i was looking for, alot of references
Rating: 5 / 5
When I start with XML, I don’t even know what that is, I have the basic knowledge of HTML, and a little bit about Basic, right now, I’m being able to write my own dynamic website by using XML. It is very understandable. It’s worth it to buy it.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is a very good book to start with web service. The explanation and examples provide most of needs to start with a web service project. It has sufficient details to use Sun tools. Readers can easily found most of their interests on this topic. The major drawback is the short of coverage on implementations of weblogic or websphere, which are of interests of most programmers. This is excellent book for starters or mid-level developers
Rating: 4 / 5
This particular book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of PHP development. I was pleased with the vast amount of topics covered. This book is a very useful tool for developers.
Rating: 5 / 5
The author points out that programmers will often leave the specifications behind after the first month and go off in a different direction … and he says this is *a good thing!* He encourages programmers and their managers to ignore documentation, as it just slows down the inherently creative programming process.
If an author wants to guarantee a positive response, there are few better ways than telling people their own laziest, worst instincts are actually the preferred model. Some of his points are so wildly off-base that it isn’t worth the time to decide if the rest of what he says is worthwhile.
Rating: 1 / 5
Unfortunately, this i the text book required for my college’s online XML course. This is the third Thompson Course Technology New Perspectives book I’ve had to purchase for a class, and it is by far the worst. I had no real problems with the “HTML and XHTML” or “Javascript” books. This XML book on the other hand offers poor explanations of concepts, and code examples that don’t always work. Some chapters mention concepts, barely explain them, and then require they be used as part of the case problems to end the chapter. If I wanted to learn XML by searching the internet I wouldn’t have purchased an $80 book. A mistake or two would be forgivable, but this book continually amazes me with how bad it is.
Rating: 1 / 5
I love this 300 pages book. Readers wrote a lot about this very good book.
I hope that other books having 500+, or even 1000+ pages, please be broken down to 1+ volumns in order for max of 300 pages/each volumn. That would help protect books when used by reader from itself damaged by its heavy weight & too thick. Readers don’t have to take those “big guys” with them, rather than just the volumns that they need at that moment.
Rating: 5 / 5
The writing is very dry in this book though it has plenty of examples. I should have waited for the O’Reilly Java & XML book which is going to be published soon.
In addition, an annoyance is that this book talks about Eclipse only. If an IDE is going to be covered both Eclipse and Netbeans should be discussed. If you are not going to cover both, cover neither.
I have learned a few things from this book but it has room to grow before the next version.
Rating: 3 / 5
The info doesn’t do a very good job explaining bits of the code. They just give you a few pages of code at a time and then shows you what the end result looks like. I would have preferred it covering less topics and explaining them better. This book is good if you already have a high traffic site and want to add another feature. Amazon web services may not be the best place if you are wanting to make some income from selling their stuff. The book says it is better if you have something to sell through amazon web services. I also couldn’t get one example to work so I emailed the author but didn’t get any reply.
Rating: 4 / 5
Dont you get sick of books that are basically help files and online documentation with some window dressing?? Well this book avoids that totally….granted it does have some reference type material in it, but only to get you up to speed on relevant technologies.
I have heard of these guys before …and they are the real deal…they have the real world experience and this book shows it.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is titled ‘THE EXPERT VOICE IN JAVA TECHNOLOGY’. But this book is full of something like how to use eclipse(window pictures in many pages), which most of experienced programmers already know. It repeats this again and again. Another book ‘Java & XML ‘ is much better than this one.
Rating: 2 / 5
Worst Book in terms of $ I have invested. May be the person who wants to do just goofing can use the terminology from this book
Rating: 1 / 5
XML is everywhere today. Before reading this book I had a good understanding of XML but after finishing it I can say that I have a deep understanding of the subject. The book covers XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS, XSL-FO, different XML schemas, XSLT, XPath, XQuery in great detail using very comprehensive hand-on examples. It goes further on covering AJAX, XML and .NET, XML and JAVA. The books includes a very detailed explanation of SOAP, WSDL and Web Services. It also introduces Resource Description Framework and the Semantic Web.
This book is for anyone that wants to get a deep understanding of XML. It is not a light introduction. It is not a book for platform specific Web Services implementation (ex. WCF)
I recommend it for everyone who really wants to understand XML for professional use.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book added very little to my current understanding of SOA. In fact I am not really sure what it contributes to the design strategies of SOA, and it is kind of too late to introduce SOA in year 2008 -> about almost 8 years after its inception. To learn about SOA basics I suggeet to get the SOA for Dummies book that does a better job on explaining SOA. Also the chapters about SOA security and SOA governance are poor and again do not add to the current industry discussion of SOA. I do not recommend it to mid or expert level SOA persons. But even people that starting with SOA will find it poor to begin with. It is too late too little. I like the case studies in the end of the book and again I am not sure why these cases are for insurance companies. Is this book for the insurence industry only?
Rating: 1 / 5
I strongly recommend this book for senior IT management, SOA architects and anyone interested in how to make an SOA project a success. The principles read like they were directly from the SOA projects I’ve worked on in the past, what works and what doesn’t. The sections on IT organization in the beginning are the best I’ve ever seen. The service governance sections are also the best, essential for anyone developing design time governance standards. The service examples are an absolute must read for anyone desiring how to learn to define services and their granularity. I couldn’t have written much better myself
Overall, I commend the authors and IBM for providing such an invaluable book for the progressive IT organization – fail to read at the peril of not delivering ROI on your SOA projects, delivering on-time and within budget. I’ve sent recommendations to all involved.
Rating: 5 / 5
Amazon has done an amazing job of creating a very simple API, which Jason Levitt does an excellent job of explaining. Easy to read, easy to comprehend, now let’s see what kind of user interface you can build with this tool. And maybe, just maybe, someone will benefit from what you’ve built, buy something from Amazon, and you can share in the sale.
Rating: 5 / 5
Though I’ve only given this book a four star review, it’s solely because I haven’t finished it. The portion of the book I’ve read has been extremely informative and logically presented in an easily digestable format. Mr. Englander makes a habit of reiterating concepts periodically so that they stick with you by the time you’ve put the book down.
I work for a rather large dot com preparing to expose some product interfaces via SOAP…when all is successfully deployed, I’ll have Mr. Englander to thank…
Rating: 4 / 5
The Pro SQL Server 2008 XML book dives right into the details of XML from the first page. This book was written by a developer for developers, and the author goes to great lengths to demonstrate all the concepts presented in the book. In my opinion, this book scores highly in many areas.
The author assumes a basic knowledge of SQL, but he thoroughly explains every step of SQL Server’s XML functionality along the way. The book even compares and contrasts the SQL Server implementation of XML to the W3C and ISO standards, pointing out where the SQL Server implementation differs.
However, while the book assumes this basic understanding, any developer interested in getting the most out of SQL Server’s XML functions will find the book both informative and enjoyable. The author goes to great lengths to explain XML and why it’s relevant in the database. This is absolutely the best reference for SQL Server XML that I’ve seen.
The author provides what he calls “Cross-Platform Tips” at various points to call attention to limitations of the SQL Server implementation, or areas where it differs from the standards. These types of tips, generously portioned throughout the book, are designed to keep people from wasting hours trying to figure out why the XQuery code sample they copied from the Internet (or some other source) isn’t working as advertised on SQL Server. While this book is written for SQL Server 2008, much of the functionality described works with (or is similar to) SQL Server 2005 functionality (as the author points out, some notable exceptions include the added support for Geography Markup Language “GML”, and the FLWOR statement “let” clause). As the book explains, the difference between SQL Server 2005 XML functionality and SQL Server 2008 XML functionality is not nearly as large as the leap was from SQL 2000 to 2005. New SQL Server 2008 features aside, this book works equally well as a reference to SQL Server 2005 XML functionality!
Another thing I like about this book is that the author builds on the code samples from one chapter to the next. There is a particularly detailed example of a hierarchical “bill of materials” that the author continually adds newly introduced functionality to over the course of a few chapters. He uses this example to demonstrate how to layer XML functionality to build an intricate application from a very basic premise. I really like the fact that this book provides examples and addresses the problems that most books go out of their way to avoid. Where many books give you a simple top-down hierarchical organization chart that’s been done 100 times by 100 different people, this book gives you recursive XML Schemas. Instead of just rehashing the well-advertised SQL Server limitation that Document Type Definitions can’t be used to validate your XML this book gives you working examples of code to get around the issue. The book provides many more real world examples, with some pretty intriguing ideas as well (like grabbing an XML RSS feed or searching eBay directly from SQL Server). A nice bonus: Almost all examples are designed to run directly in the AdventureWorks 2008 sample database, and all are freely downloadable from the publisher’s website.
And this book doesn’t just stop at the server. The author provides analysis of client-side tools including LINQ to XML, SQLXML, HTTP SOAP Endpoints, and a wide supporting cast of XML support tools – many that are provided “out of the box” with SQL Server.
This is the ultimate reference for all things XML on SQL Server 2008.
Rating: 5 / 5
At face value, this book looks comprehensive. However, it suffers from being so dull that it is impossible to stay awake for more than a few sentences. Typical example: “A web service is provided by a provider entity. A provider entity can be an individual or an organisation. A provider entity provides the web service through a provider agent”. If you are still awake – well done! This book was unusable for me.
Rating: 2 / 5
It gives us the best look in a glance of what XML is all about and teaches us great good things. A Tricki but very well acomplished book with great examples. A must Buy!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
The book is great for novices, especially when it comes to handling enterprise integration. Most of the information is just ho-hum.
Rating: 3 / 5
I had the opportunity to meet the author while flying back home to Trinidad. We discussed usage of web services and how they could help with a project I am working on. He even convinced me to consider to offer a course at our university on the subject. He is knowledgable and I hope he will visit our country again.
Rating: 5 / 5
Interesting topics and good book organization.
I think that it contributes to understanding of governance in general and not only to SOA.
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this guide because I needed a quick lookup for XML schema elements (something you’d think would be readily available online, but isn’t – at least not in a usable form). The bulk of the book (70 of its 162 pages – about half) is dedicated to XSD, so I was very happy with what I got. The first 30 pages cover XML itself (all the nitpicking details like predefined entities, what characters are allowed in attribute names, etc). The next 17 pages cover DTD (which you may occasionally still need to know, even these days). The next 70 cover XML Schema, and the book finishes up with an additional 43 pages on Relax-NG and Schematron (two competing, and not very common, schema definition formats).
I agree with other reviewers that the book would have been complete without the Relax-NG and Schematron coverage, but it would have just been 43 pages shorter if that was the case – there’s really not much else they could have said about XML, DTD and XSD and still have been a concise “pocket reference”. This book is actually pretty thick for an O’Reilly pocket reference – I have four other pocket guides on my bookshelf right now, and the other three have 120, 124 and 66 pages each. By that standard, I figure the coverage of Relax-NG and Schematron were just a “buy one get one free” type of add-on, especially since this book costs the same as all the other pocket reference books.
This book is a perfect reference for somebody who needs a quick, handy reference to XML schema and the occasional XML rule.
Rating: 5 / 5
Started off very trivial but by Part II had become completely incomprehensible, introducing new terminology without explanation at every line.
Doesn’t work at a business or technical level and certainly will not help any business get going with SOA.
Very poorly written book – don’t waste your money.
Still searching for a book or website that actually helps someone get going on what looks like it should be a good methodology.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was so keen to learn from this book, but no matter how hard I tried it had too much nonsense to be readable or usable.
Rating: 1 / 5
Although the seller’s description of the book as being in good shape was surely truthful, their use of an envelope, rather than a more rigid shipping container resulted in the softcover book sustaining cosmetic damage during shipping.
Rating: 2 / 5
“SOA is only a concept”, This is the only useful line in the book once you are a programmer.
If your job consists in saying many unconcluding words at your job meetings, maybe this book has something to teach.
Rating: 2 / 5
I am involved in a project to determine the best practices for integrating web services into our applications. We purchased a handful of recommended books on the topic including this one. I have to say that I am disappointed in this book.
First off there is little coverage of web services from an architecture point of view. There are some decent chapters that introduce the concepts of web services and SOA and then the authors jump directly into reference mode on the dozen or so technologies that they think you must master to develop web services.
Maybe it is just a failure of the J2EE process, but this book does little to address the confusion and complexity involved with developing web services in Java. In fact this book just adds to the problem. Developers should not need to know all the details of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and all the JAX APIs in order to develop web services. For the most part, all this plumbing technology should be hidden from developers yet it is the focus of this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book covers all aspects of MDM needed to know in depth the topic.
Excellent book.
Rating: 5 / 5
When I was trying to pick a book to fill in the gaps (chasms) in my XML experience, I routed around in the amazon percentage, (what percent of people bought this book, what percent bought other books.) This one seemed to have a good go-to ratio, and on one of the other books, the review referred to this one. I bought it second hand and got an excellent price. I am pleased. It reads easily and has a useful index.
With that said, this 800+ page book includes:
XML Basics: Syntax, Editors, Other tools
Presentation: XHTML and CSS
XML-FO
Defining Structure: DTDs and Schemas (and Relax NG)
XML as Data: the template translator XSLT, XPath, and XQuery
XML in the Data Tier, relation to relational DBs
Programming XML: the XML Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML (SAX) ,and yes Ajax, XML and .Net, XML and Java, Python, Ruby, and Perl
XML Services: RSS and Atom, Web services
SOAP and WSDL:
Advanced Web services
more stuff including 30 pages of XML in Office Development.
Rating: 4 / 5
I bought this book to have some knowledge of XML, but his book is so boring….This is my third week and I am in chapter 2, and believe me I am pushing myself to read it. I think I will buy another XML book or just go straight to a XHTML book. I understand that without theory you cannot explain anything, but this is too much…to much theory.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book desperately needs an update with real-world SOAP examples passing complex data into SOAP::Lite running in PERL.
Rating: 3 / 5
When I first started reading the book, I thought it would be just another SOA book, with lots of fluff/propaganda and little solid material on SOA. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by the contents of the book. The book does provide a great overview of SOA and the associated distributing computing technologies such as sockets, RPC, distributed objects, and messaging but, in addition, it provides code examples for each of SOA-based integration patterns, which makes it extremely useful book for practictioning IT professional such as IT Architects and developers.
Furthermore, a very appealing aspects of this book is that it provides a complete description of the SOA and SOA-based integration patterns by addressing gaps in these areas which exists in the current literature. Thus, in addition to describing web services and how to develop them, it contains detailed chapters on the enterprise service bus and integration of mainframe based applications. I especially liked the chapter on the Enterprise Service Bus – I have not found such a comprehensive treatment of the Enterprise Service Bus in any other book on SOA.
In the end, I have learned a great deal from reading this book and I highly recommend this book to any IT professional who is interested in the subject of SOA and Enterprise integration. The book would serve as a great reference for IT architects, senior developers, and IT managers.
Rating: 5 / 5
A good reference book for Java Web Services. It had most of what I was looking for. Lacked depth and samples but the nutshell series was always meant to be more a reference than a tutorial.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book discusses technologies that a Java/JEE developer would use on a regular basis. It keeps it real by providing sample code and discussing the concepts at a technical level unlike other books that bombard you with buzzwords and jargon.
I keep the included sample projects mounted in Eclipse all the time. I found myself copying and pasting from these samples into my own programs. I do this not only for APIs that I am learning but also with APIs that I am pretty familiar with. I do this to save time as I won’t have to lookup javadoc or other internet resources.
I have worked as a J2EE Architect and am now working as a Web Services Architect. As part of my job I frequently develop documentation on concepts discussed in this book for providing guidance to my developers. Now all I do is, I give them this book and refer them to a relevant chapters.
In short this is the only book I need for all my XML development needs. A must have in any Java/JEE developer’s bookshelf.
Rating: 5 / 5
Best reference I have found on MDM. Authoratative and complete, but will become outdated quickly.
Rating: 5 / 5
An earlier post provided a link to Wiley that now appears to be outdated. However, I did find the new link on their website. I have not used this product and had to rate it to provide feedback. So, I gave it a neutral so as not so skew the reviews.
[...]
Rating: 3 / 5
Too much verbose, disconnected concepts and the writing style is hard to follow – like too many cooks spoil the broth. The book did well to introduce the basics of SOA but failed to connect the dots in terms of practical approaches with patterns and best practices. The content in Part 2 of this book sound a vendor specific material and couple of chapters are just showing less short than a hello world case study.
Rating: 2 / 5
Amazon deleted my last negative review so I’m writing another one. This book is nothing but middle manager buzzwards and little content. Beware all the 5 star ‘real name’ reviews below. Someone is stacking the deck on this one.
Rating: 1 / 5
I was surprised to see good reviews of this book. There seems to be an audience that finds this book useful, but it’s not clear to me why.
This book lacks any analysis or useful conceptual insight. The author also seems to have spent little or no effort in attempting to organise the material. It’s simply a bottom-up, blow-by-blow account of walking through the steps of developing trivial applications using the Apache and GLUE SOAP servers. Most people would be far better off reading the documentation for the SOAP platfrom they want to use.
From my point of view, this book borders on fraud. It’s clear from this book that Oreilly have really dropped their game.
Rating: 2 / 5
The book was new as described and I received it very quickly. I would suggest using a carboard box or wrapping instead of the flat rate evelopes as USPS kind of mistreated it. The mail man tried rolling the book and tried fitting it into my tiny apartment mailbox.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book starts with the basics of XML and builds right through how to build and deploy enterprise applications using Web Services and .NET. A great book for anyone looking to add professional .NET development experience to their resume.
Rating: 5 / 5
Everything went out fine.
I was familiar with the book (ISTC is a quality stamp)
and the expectations were fulfilled.
Rui Serra
APCOMTEC
Rating: 4 / 5
I wrote on earlier version of this book, “An ESB is in the core of most enterprise SOA implementations and AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB) is one of the leading ESB. This book covers all the features expected from a modern ESB using realistic use cases and samples that run on ALSB. Once you downloaded the samples you will have a library of solutions that may be applied to your own projects or may be used to explore ALSB features. In addition the book covers the service design, specially the design of composite and orchestrated services deployed on the bus. Although the book is written particularly for ALSB, the topics covered in it will give you very good idea on any modern ESB. I found this book very useful for my projects; applied many of the solutions included in this book. I recommend it for new beginners as well as experienced service developers, SOA architects, and managers overseeing SOA projects.”
What I described above is even more relevant with the new version. It is also clear that (ALSB then) now Oracle Service Bus (OSB) evolved to include several new features that alone makes this book a valuable reference. In addition, the content is solidified with field experience, feedback and expanded with wealth of information based on experience of the additional new experts/authors including security, new development environment, and new sections such as custom transport development, using Java and EJBs and more… Again, this book will give you a solid background on ESB in general, but if you have or planning to build on an Oracle SOA platform this book is introducing and describing the core of it, is a must!
Rating: 5 / 5
Quite some time ago, Apress sent me Pro XML and Web Services to review, and I am just now getting around to it. First off, let me say that this book is huge. It weighs in at 936 pages, and the one I have is a hard-cover. Rob Richards has done an amazing job at providing an incredibly comprehensive volume, covering a vast amount of information.
Anything I write in this review will probably not do the book full justice, simply because it is so extensive. That being said, I will attempt to briefly summarize its contents, so you will have an idea of just how much is covered. Here is a listing of topics by each of the 21 chapters:
1. Introduction to XML and Web Services
2. XML Structure
3. Validation
4. XPath, XPointer, XInclude, and the Future
5. PHP and XML
6. Document Object Model (DOM)
7. SimpleXML
8. Simple API for XML (SAX)
9. XMLReader
10. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
11. Effective and Efficient Processing
12. XML Security
13. PEAR and XML
14. Content Syndication: RSS and Atom
15. Web Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX)
16. XML-RPC
17. Representational State Transfer (REST)
18. SOAP
19. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
20. PEAR and Web Services
21. Other XML Technologies and Extensions
Appendices:
1. XML Schema Built-In Data Types Reference
2. Extension APIs
3. Features and Changes in PHP 6
As you can see, there is quite a bit to be learned from this veritable tome of knowledge. There is even a sneak peek of what is around the corner for the future version of PHP 6. Since I can’t really go over it all (well I could, but won’t), allow me to point out some of the things I enjoyed about this book.
If you have worked with well-formed XHTML files at all, you no doubt are familiar with this bit of code, usually at the top of every document…
[...]
If you were to navigate to that *.dtd file, you would see a Document Type Definition for Extensible HTML 1.0. In fact, why don’t you just go ahead and check it out. If you get a browser prompt, just open it in your favorite code editor. All of that information is what XHTML 1.0 Strict is validated against. XHTML, being a rewrite / facelift of HTML in XML, adheres to the W3C concept of Namespaces in XML. XHTML 1.1 also has a DTD, as does HTML 4.01, etc.
Hopefully it comes no surprise that you’ve been working with XML concepts for some time now, perhaps unknowingly. Richards helps demystify these concepts, and shows how to write your own custom Document Type Definitions. After all, that is the key tenet of XML – Extensibility. As long as things are properly self closing, there is a whole lot of flexilibility available. I liked his example of < sarcasm >…< /sarcasm > in one of the opening chapters.
After the chapters on XML, he moves to talking about the Document Object Model or DOM for short. You’ve no doubt heard this term before, probably in conjunction with JavaScript. DOM though, is language neutral or multi-lingual you could say. Just as JavaScript can be used to manipulate the DOM on the client-side, PHP can be used on the server-side to parse an XML document. That is of course the fundamental aspect of AJAX – shared information via XML between JS and a server-side language. In the case of this book, it’s PHP.
In chapter 20 on PEAR and Web Services, he gets into how to use the services offered by Amazon, Del.icio.us, Ebay, Google, Techorati, Weather.com and Yahoo. In chapter 21, he touches briefly on Ajax. He does so from the standpoint that because it is becoming so prevalent, a PHP developer may need to know at least how it will interface with one’s server-side code.
Also in the last chapter, he covers some things to think about when designing PHP driven sites to be served up on mobile devices. You could think of the wireless realm like the old West. The dust is still settling, and no real consensus has been reached as of yet. Some people swear by Wireless Markup Language, being pioneered by the Open Mobile Alliance, whereas others stick by the W3C recommendation to use XHTML Basic. It should be noted that the OMA and W3C are not at odds. WML is in fact written in XML.
Well, I will wrap this up. Hopefully I was not too brief in highlighting what I thought was cool. Really, the whole book is very good, but to write a paragraph about every chapter would make for a really lengthy review. I would highly recommend this as a resource for any developers who want to really dig in and solidify their working knowledge of PHP and web services, or just want to explore the nuances and complexities of XML DTD’s and namespaces.
Rating: 5 / 5
Well.. I have pre-ordered that book back in Feb and was very anxious to get it. I read it cover to cover and could not find any how-tos, migration paths, implementation ideas, etc.. AWS is a new concept so many IT Directors and sysasdmins who have previously deployed “three tier” structure (DB – MiddleLayer – Web server) are desperate to find how to migrate your typical “data center” / “managed service” / “colocation” into Amazon web cloud (EC2 /S3)- besides lots of Ruby examples that book has little to offer: no structure, no migration. Bottom line: if you want to start fresh and “play” with AWS -this one is for you, if you manage 4 or 5 or 20 data centers and concern about how many servers do you really need and how to move your high availability application to Amazon – you need to look elsewhere.
Rating: 2 / 5
I think this book is great, first time I have seen it advertized I thought: “I have to get this”. Have not finished reading it yet, I am about one third through, but I think one of the big flaws (if not indeed the author meant it that way) is that it dives into XML / WSDL / SOAP too soon or too sudden… at least for me. By the time I have started understanting how everything is organized in the scheme of things, it was all about that, and I personally don’t have experience — a lot with these things.
Another thing I don’t particularly enjoy is the presentation is intertwined — PHP 4 and PHP 5. At times this is confusing and if you just browse trough trying to find something randomly, you always have to read back a little bit to find out whether it’s about PHP 4 or 5.
Otherwise, I am pretty happy with it and can’t wait to actually start implementing some things I heave learned in this book in my own applications.
Rating: 4 / 5
I found this book gave a good overview of JAX-RPC and JWSDK
features. But this book is very specific to the Sun JWSDK
implementation. There is nothing on Apache AXIS or differences
between implementations. The biggest deficiency for me was that
there is nothing at all on DIME and it only dicusses the
non-standard Sun JWSDK SOAP with MIME attachments API without
mentioning any alternatives.
Rating: 4 / 5
XML is changing at a lightning fast pace, and this 2000 book is already out of date.
Rating: 2 / 5
I have very much enjoyed using this book. It is written in easy to understand language, but it is certainly not dumbed down either.
I found the example code used to be extremely succinct. This contrasts sharply with many other technical books that use either numerous code examples where more explanation would better serve the reader or not enough examples to illustrate a point.
The information covered is also quite comprehensive, covering everything from the very basics of XML structure and usage up to advanced XML used in RSS, WDDX, XML-RPC, and defining web services using SOAP. This book includes everything you’ll need to know to integrate with many current web services or build your own.
Rating: 5 / 5
Very well written primer on the .Net framework, internal workings of the CLR and language fundamentals. Great book.
Rating: 5 / 5
Picked up a copy of this book from the library, and was very disappointed.
It is full of stupid jokes, the table of contents is mostly useless because of the childish and uninformative chapter/section titles.
More than 50% of the book is useless fluff like “OK so you really want to know what service oriented architecture is? That’s good, hold on, it won’t be too hard — you’ll understand all of this later. Don’t be scared off by these very technical terms — we’ll get through it….” — PAGE AFTER PAGE of it. You will (literally) learn more from the Wikipedia article on SOA than you will from this entire book.
If you want a good book on the subject, get “SOA in Practice” by Nicolai Josuttis instead — it is much clearer, more interesting, and in-depth.
Do not waste your money on this book — get it from a library or a dumpster.
Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book with lot of hopes, all I got is a JUNK. This book is nothing but a copy of specs obtained from OACIS and W3C. If you think about on implementing a WORKING Web services architecture using Java or .NET, then all you find is ZERO content. There is no working real-world architecture or implementation example discussed in this book. All the chapters are disconnected.
Waste of money.
Rating: 1 / 5
Everybody or most of everybody that are in web design in some form or another have heard about XML or even used it a bit. But personally I feel there are a small amount of resources out there that really teach you how to use XML in “real-world” scenarios. It’s nice to know what it is and know that many applications use it behind the scenes, but it still doesn’t help people understand how to use it for our own web applications.
This book solves that problem wonderfully by first showing you first what XML is and how to format proper XML documents. Then the author discusses how to publish XML documents in a couple web site examples (web catalog for one) and showing how to style these documents using regular CSS and XSLT, schemas as well as other technologies such as XPath and XQuery.
Each chapter presents a new problem (rendering XML to print, searching and merging documents, integrating web services, RSS feeds) and goes through step by step in how to work it out with really nice code examples. You really don’t need to read this book end to end to get the most out of it. Just pick a chapter and read through it since the author re-summarizes what was previously covered to bring you up to speed.
So for example, if you have XML documents that you need to integrate into a database (DB2, SQL Server, etc) or want to learn how to create XML documents from a database table(s) it first shows the necessary SQL to pull the data you need, then how to use various tools to create your format.
The book does use one program (Stylus Studio 2006) in particular but the author mentions other open-source programs that you can use as well (in Appendix too). A great little book (under 300 pages) that shows you some great uses for XML as well as teaching you how and why you should use it.
A great buy!
Rating: 5 / 5
I bought this book with the intentions that it would give me examples clear and crisp about Master Data Management. But each time I read a chapter, it was lacking the information that I was looking for.This book takes a point and talks about it for pages and pages together. Sometimes, this book put me to sleep. Maybe it is just me , all the reviews that I read were so positive about this book.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is one of the most complete books on web services published to date. The authors have done a great job of writing about both architectural and development issues surrounding web services.
Rating: 5 / 5
As with all O’Reilly books there’s a great intro to the technologies. They take you through how it works, not just how to deploy some code. When you get to the XML-RPC modules, they don’t force a solution on you, but give a great tour of what’s available and let you pick. For me, the highlight was the intro to Randy J. Ray’s RPC::XML modules (he’s also one of the authors). I’ve been fighting with getting the ’system.*’ handlers hacked in with other aproaches and it was great to see someone had already figured out such a clean approach. (Which is something since Perl can get reeeaaal ugly!) This book has saved me many days of wasted development.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a very good launch pad for embarking on a SOA infrastructure within an Enterprise. While the examples and anecdotes are specific to the Oracle Service Bus product, the concepts are universally applicable to any ESB, and SOA strategy. I particularly liked chapter #7, Asynchronous Messaging, for providing useful patterns in decoupling message consumers from message producers, and chapter 9, Advanced Messaging Topics, describing how to constrain my service consumers with “Service Throttling”. With plenty of examples, and step-by-step instructions, this book provides a good tutorial for first-time OSB users, and a reliable reference for more seasoned ALSB/OSB professionals.
Rating: 4 / 5
The web is a marvelous way to exchange information. But it is very visually oriented. You browse to a site and read what you find. Alternatively you can download a filek, but this file is dependent on what the originator thinks you need.
XML is of course the answer. XML allows the sender and receiver of information to use the existing packet switching web communication channels and the existing servers to handle the transmission of data between machines.
XML is the core structure of a group of messaging commands. This combines with the SOAP protocol to define how messages are to be formatted using XML formats. Combining XML with SOAP and other standards results in the general concept of Web Services.
This book discusses the complete set of standards that make up web services. It is a reference format book, not a tutorial. It is, as the title says, on the architecture and specifications.
Rating: 5 / 5
Good book for someone new to html, xslt, xml and the like. You get a good background of the evolution of the webspace languages as you are learning, and lots of little self-tests and pretty good examples. I had trouble with the CD-Rom, the Turbo XML included either no longer supported the beta copy or I missed something in the installation, in any case I never bothered with it any more. I was mostly just using it to gain an overall understanding of XML before I started studying XSLT. For that it was sufficient. I didn’t really do many of the examples, but they seemed well developed and had a logical flow.
The part I had a little problem with, but only a little, was when it came to writing code that would access outside data, especially tables and databases, and a bit with how the sorting worked. Probably had I done some hands on work it would’ve clarified it, but I was a bit lazy for that. In any case, overall it takes a simple language and doesn’t make it needlessly complicated, and the style is light and breezy without being flippant. You probably could knock it out in a weekend.
Rating: 4 / 5
Looks like other reviewers have beaten this book up on other aspects, so I’m not going to repeat what they say.
Another important fact that this book misses is that the Python language has the most flexible and “make sense” implementation of SOAP library.
I have dealt with SOAP since mid-last year when we need to find a technology that will bridge COM and Java world that performs acceptably. The choice fell on SOAP. Since our system is Java-based, we need to use Java SOAP.
The interesting point is that it took us just 2 weeks to come up with a Python prototype program which we continuously use to measure up the Java SOAP implementation which ends up taking us months to complete.
This shows just how up-to-date the Python community is in keeping up with new technologies (those that have potentials).
So why Python is not included in the selection of the language in this book is beyond me.
NOTE: For readers who ask “Python-what??”: Python is a typeless language that is more readable than Visual Basic but as versatile as Perl.
Rating: 2 / 5
I almost purchased this book as we’ve been using Amazon AWS more and more. Aside from lacking perl and PHP examples, what concerned me the most is that forms are used as examples in Amazon.com’s text. Forms that include information for which google indexes, and forms that use hidden fields (which are not so hidden) to pass information which hackers can also use. In today’s age of cyber warfare, I don’t recommend any method which includes plain text key information.
Rating: 1 / 5
The majority of the new material in this book is on different schema specifications. Schema, Relax NG and Schematron are covered. A handy book to have around when you are hacking XML. The online free documentation is not as handy as the content as it’s organized in this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book clearly explains the concepts and principles of SOA and makes the vital link to Enterprise Architecture. I would highly recommend this book to start with. If you then need more detail on for instance SOA Design Principles or SOA Design Patterns read Thomas Erl’s series.
Rating: 5 / 5
Ho trovato questo libro molto interessante.
Copre le varie API disponibili per JAVA per gestire file XML: SAX, DOM, JAXP, StAX, JDOM, dom4j. Inoltre vengono trattati anche alcuni argomenti avanzati, utili per apprendere al meglio l’uso di queste API.
Il libro e’ colmo di codice ed e’ proprio il codice ad essere utilizzato come strumento didattico. Codice e diagrammi UML riempiono tutte le pagine.
E’ un libro molto pratico, rivolto ai programmatori. E’ necessario avere una piccola infarinatura riguardo l’XML: viene trattato brevemente nei primi capitoli.
E’ consigliato a chi ama libri con un approccio pragmatico.
mircha
Rating: 4 / 5
I’m almost finished with this book, but have yet to determine what its purpose is. There is a lot of code about a lot of APIs, but it is not clear how one should approach Java & XML using this book. I think this book was a product of O’Reilly’s “Rough Cuts” program, and it is true the book is very roughly written and all the good stuff got cut. Maybe all the material which would make this a good book is on the website.
I must admit I’m very disappointed with O’Reilly as of late. Their books are going down hill rapidly, and I find I’m looking at other publishers (APress) much more often. I used to go to O’Reilly’s website almost daily to see what is coming out next, but now I’m considering removing the Ora bookmark from my browser because of lack of use and to create space for other URLs.
I really wish O’Reilly would get their act together and start publishing some well written and well edited books again.
Rating: 1 / 5
This books is great for anyone trying to learn XML. I am currently in a class that is web only. So with no in class instructions the book is even more key. This book is written step by step explaining why you are doing what they are instructing. A varitable cookbook for XML. As opposed to the Java class I took over the summer. The instructor could not have picked a more poorly written book. Some people know there stuff and others can actually put it into words that the novice can understand and relate. This is the sign of a true teacher. Carey is able to do this. I have had other classes with his books and they have great as well. The other benefit is that this books was much cheaper through Amazon than the bookstore. I would highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a good book on SOA and covers numerous topics related to the subject. Especially for those who are getting into application integration technologies, it would be very helpful. The size of the book is just appropriate, not too long, not too short.
Rating: 4 / 5
Web services, the new way of stitching data and processing resources together to form elaborate, distributed applications, aren’t like other software systems. They differ even from other architectures for distributed applications. This book is better than any other book out there in helping readers come to grips with the terms, technologies, behaviors, and design requirements that define the Web services universe.
For an architect or manager who has the responsibility of planning the future EAI strategic direction for the company this book provides an honest basis to make well informed decisions e.g. does one move towards ebXML now or wait, or choose SOAP, WSDL, UDDI as they appear to be heading.
No book can be all things to all people and where the authors have thought appropriate they have referred the reader to further reading. I recommend this book for all Republicans in California.
Rating: 5 / 5
Excellent resource, but a bit droll. The content is laid out well, there are plenty of (working) examples, and there’s pretty much no fluff to the book at all (in contrast to many O’Reilly books which add a fair amount of humor and distraction).
My chief worry when I received the book was that the title on the spine said “Programming Amazon Web Servcies [sic]“. Yes, really the spine has a typo! The cover page does *not* have the typo. Obviously I was worried that the content might have similar brazen errors. But so far not so.
I’d recommend this book for anyone who needs an EC2/S3/AWS reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
One of the most comperhensive book about SOA, but the auther made it simple by providing easy to understand, step by step technique. As a .NET developer I founded it very interesting to learn about all the different methods of system integration. The use of diagrams through out the book make it easier to understand the concept.Over all, I loved it and highly recommend it
Rating: 5 / 5
It’s OK… it’s nothing informative. I’d recommend buying some of the books that thoroughly cover SOAP and books that thoroughly cover Java + Web Services. This is nice and all but it just doesn’t pack a meaningful punch.
Rating: 3 / 5
One of the best books on the subject I’ve encountered in the last thirteen years of working with the internet. The tutorials are excellent – in that they appeared to be well debugged prior to publication. They do an excellent job in preparing a student for any of the four cases found at the end of each section. The only weakness encountered was that there was no comprehensive reference table of tags and associated attributes.
Rating: 5 / 5
If you are just getting into XML, this book is an excellent starter for bringing you up to speed. There have been some updates since this release but that’s just the way of technology, but you should definitely buy this book and keep it on your bookshelf.
Rating: 5 / 5
I work with a lot of school leavers and people outside IT and often have to advise them on how to empower themselves in IT in the right way. Surely SQL and databases are one of the first topics people should understand. HTML was also high on the list. With this book, the author has combined all of them in one making it a very relevant combination for today’s beginner. I will recommend this book to school leavers, financial people and people outside IT wanting to empower themselves quickly. Another great advantage of XML and databases is the platform independence. Very well done to the author for combining these topics at the entry level in such an easiliy understandable way!
Rating: 5 / 5
This was the first book I read on .NET and I have to say I am not happy with it. While there is certainly a lot of very good material in it, overall I wish I had looked elsewhere.
My goal in picking up my first .NET book was to find out what this new framework from Microsoft was all about, which directions it would take us in, and how I could best profit from it. Months after reading this book I can now safely say that it accomplished few if any of these goals.
What I got instead was a mass of loosely connected and highly technical data, almost like a bunch of pages that fell out of a documentation manual. These boring technicalities do not belong in a general .NET book. Most people will use it as an introduction to the framework, not as a reference.
For example, nowhere in this book did I read the fact that Microsoft intends to promote its framework primarily on the server side at first. Consumer applications will have a much harder time using .NET, presumably until Microsoft makes a client-side push with version 2 of the framework. This is the sort of important information that you can’t get from Microsoft’s promotional material. I was hoping to therefore learn it from this book, but I learned about the structure of COFF headers instead.
I read the 1st edition of this book, so it is possible that authors had little more than technical documentation to work with. Maybe the 2nd edition is more to my liking. But I doubt that it’s much better, because that would warrant a complete structural change of the book.
Rating: 2 / 5
DYNAMIC SOA AND BPM: BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND SOA AGILITY tells how to integrate SOA and BPM for maximum business flexibility and comes from an IBM SOA architect who offers a step-by-step tutorial on combining the two. From moving from simplified integration to a dynamic process to planning for services and providing an integration layer, this is a key pick for any technical computer business library.
Rating: 5 / 5