Nick Newman said
This book covers many of the details needed for successful use of web services with Java. It goes a little further and gives some philosophy for use of web services that should lead to maintainable services.
Mr. D. S. Stadler said
I've read all of the reviews here, which are interesting and provocative. The ironic thing is that I agree with much of what the one and two star reviewers said but still rate this book 5 stars.
Potential buyers need to know what they are getting. This is the single best book on JWS programming available. It's incredibly dense. The acronyms fly all over the place. Hansen dives into technologies and if you don't know the technologies already you will find yourself spending hours digging into things like XSLT. We're talking about many, many hours to swallow the whole thing. It's an expert's book - anyone who is serious about JWS and SOA has to have this book with Monson-Haefel 'J2EE Web Services' right next to it to cover the stuff Hansen doesn't address.
But I also recommend the book to people who are less serious and have less time, and even to beginners. These readers should buy the book, start with section 7.7 (an excellent demo of the Java 6 Endpoint class, which is as simple as JWS gets), and maybe do Chapter 3 to learn something about REST (also fairly simple). Then put it on your shelf until you have a few hours free, and tackle a section of one of the chapters. Keep at it, though it might take a while. This book will improve your understanding over time. I've encountered a few technical books which I've worn into a limp condition from reading and re-reading - this looks like another.
Nightcoder said
This book can be really good if you are used to work with maven and ant, otherwise it will be hard to follow. So if you are the kind who likes and best understands things by putting your hands on source code, I'd recommend getting a grasp on the mechanics of maven first, otherwise you'll be struggling with the book contents as well as with maven gimmicks.
I personally like to import maven projects into eclipse to dive in the source code, but since eclipse does not support "project nesting" I have to create a new project for every example. Take chapter 3 for instance:
It has 4 subdirectories:
eisrecords
rest-get
rest-post
xslt
Inside rest-get for instance there a 4 maven projects, 2 for services and 2 for their respective clients, and they all have 1-2 classes.
The projects work fine once you have set up your environment properly, however I'd much prefer that every project was put into a single unit (on a per chapter basis) with proper pure ant tasks - which in some cases wouldn't be so hellish to code because there aren't that many dependencies to manage, but still, using maven to build is less error prone.
Other chapters are indeed built as maven modules which makes it easier to import to eclipse but still, it's not cool having to deal with so many projects for such small examples.
I personally like the writting. I'm still on chapter 5 but so far it was the best book on the subject I could find. It goes beyond hellowordish examples and is filled with code which can be "easily" tested.
chi2la said
I'm a Java developer with 5 years experience. I wasn't looking for a beginners book, but certainly I wanted one that could give me the big picture of SOA. I think the author is an expert (as all authors should be) and he knows what he's talking about, but overall I think he's a subpar writer (in the context of writing computer books) and the book is organized poorly in my viewpoint. There's way too many acronyms in the book and the chapters are long! The book has a very "wordy" feel to it. His explanations are not "pointed" and he often injects too much extra information the just ends up confusing the reader. For example, he loves to bullet point subjects in order to create talking points. The problem is, however, each bullet point is a huge block of text and it tires out the reader. He may have 10 bullet points each with 15-20 lines of text. Don't get me wrong, he stays on topic, but he says too much. Any technical writing expert will tell you this is improper for using bullet points. Each bullet point should contain just a few lines of text. ... I think only if you are an expert SOA Architect you can get a lot out of this book. If the talking points could be just a little more brief, it could be a better book. If you are new and just want to get the big picture, you will feel lost and overwhelmed.
T. Hadam said
Author says that there are many tutorials how to create a 'hello world' webservice but when you want to create a bigger system it is not that easy. I think that when you write a book you should start from a hello world example and than explain more complex solutions. What is more, I think web services are not difficult. This book makes it difficult.
Summing up, this is terrible writing. I don't like it.
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