Kelvin D. Meeks said
One of the immediate thoughts that struck me as I read James Bean's new book is that it is an excellent text for both the novice and advanced practioner of SOA concepts.
Direct, and written with a style that is easily understood - with clear examples, and a balanced view of the trade-offs that should be considered - it is one of the few books out there that will help you navigate some of the issues that are often completely missed in other books on SOA:
- Versioning
- Extensible design of message contracts / schemas
- Canonical Message Design
- Reuse of schema components
- Performance
The author's depth of experience and practical knowledge make this book a "must have" for any team contemplating a SOA project.
Mark Reha said
The author did an excellent job of outlining an introduction to SOA that goes beyond the theory that you will find in most SOA books. The author provided a practical and real world definition of SOA using the authors professional writing style and by using plenty of diagrams, figures, illustrations, and code snippets. After the brief introduction to SOA the author then proceeded to outline in detail the most interesting topic in the book, which was the concept of top down SOA service interface design. The top down service interface design approach will teach the architect and service designer how to properly design services that will support an agile enterprise and that are adaptable and flexible to change. The author clearly explained how service versioning, XML schema extensions, service operation granularity, canonical message models, and service operation overloading each impact a properly designed service interface. The author did a great job illustrating how underlying SOA technologies, such as WSDL, XML schema, and XML, all play a key role in the top down design of a service interface. If you want a SOA service design book that goes beyond theory and will teach you the core principles for how to design robust service interfaces and you play the the role of an architect, service designer, or enterprise software engineer or practitioner, then this book is a must read. This is also a fantastic reference book that can be used in your day to day work. The only negative I had with the book was that many of the diagrams and illustrations are too small to read; however, this can be easily resolved by downloading the media from the publisher's or author's web site.
Brian K. Schween said
An excellent book.
It begins with a comprehensive introduction to SOA and Web Services concepts and principles. It then takes the reader on a logical progression through all the key topics, providing incremental exposure to explicit detail, while maintaining alignment with the core principals defined at the outset.
Extensive use of detailed technical examples, combined with real world business examples throughout, result in an excellent tutorial that maintains its focus on the key component to success with SOA and Web Services - the interface.
In my current role of leading design teams in standing up an enterprise SOA, I found this book extremely helpful on several levels, from communicating SOA and Web Services concepts and fundamentals to business executives and analysts, to understanding the challenges of, and associated best practices and patterns used by, designers and developers.
The bottom line: This book delivers as advertised, I highly recommend it.
Balaganesan Swaminathan said
Most of the SOA books that I have read associate themselves to a particular technology stack such as BizTalk or WebSphere. In doing so, they end up explaining how a SOA principle or feature is implemented using this technology (How-to). In doing so, they reduce their shelf-life.
This is the first book that addresses the underlying principles, concepts (What) and their purpose (Why). It provides a detailed explanation of these concepts, associated best practices, comparative advantages of various techniques, SOA governance and message error handling. This book closely aligns itself with standards.
This book does not assume that the reader is a novice or an expert in SOA. Every chapter is built with detailed examples.
With his extensive research and thought leadership, the author has proven himself to be an authoritative figure in SOA space.
Whether you want to learn the best way to design SOA services or to expand your understanding in a particular service design concept, this book is a must read.
It will be a reference source in my library for years to come.
Vilayanur Krishnan said
This body of work breaks new ground in the subject of "service" design patterns, schema extension patterns that are crucial to addressing the concerns that many organizations in their advanced stages of SOA maturity are starting to encounter. Key questions answered - how do I extend my "services" to accommodate changing business needs so as to a) not be disruptive to my business, b) be adaptive c) be cost effective. Simply stated, organizations that have been through initial SOA deployments are starting to ask the following questions: how do I create newer "service" offerings by extending already deployed "services" such that I do not break existing service contracts and I do not have to create new deployment instances of these newly versioned "services".
The book delves a number of areas that are key to service design and development such as canonical models. I believe vendors responsible for developing tools for SOA would benefit from the patterns described in this text.
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