Members with This Book
Newest Reviews
see all reviews-
““After the wide success of Thomas Erl’s first book, Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services, he’s done it again. His second book focuses on the engineering aspects of Web services and service-oriented architecture as a whole. One challenge is the misconception of what SOA really means and entails. Erl answers this question, addressing the reality of SOA.
H Aminu wrote this review Saturday, August 1 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Erl takes two main approaches throughout Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design: the ideal scenario and the real scenario. The ideal scenario is what we read about every day and what we’d like SOAs to be. Ideal scenarios are what standards committees shoot for when they start creating a new standard. Ideally, SOA is meant to replace the traditional distributed architecture— and to do so globally.
In reality, we’re still stuck withyears’ worth of legacy applications to deal with. More importantly, we’re not used to thinking abstractly about business processes and logic, which service orientation requires. A change must occur from the infrastructure all the way up to the business process level, bringing commitment from all levels, too.
Bridging the gap between business and IT has always been a challenge. Web services have widened this gap because both the technology side and the business side have numerous misperceptions about SOA. This situation requires a text that covers the SOA process and Web services in general from top to bottom, not strictly from the programmer’s viewpoint but also from that of designers and architects. Software designers and architects must be able to decide what an organization’s overall SOA initiative will look like, and Erl aims to simplify this task. After you decide on the overall strategy, Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design can help bring your vision to life.
The book answers basic SOA questions, such as what characteristics Web services bring to the table. It covers Web services theory and outlines a step-by-step service orientation design process (process being the key word here) that you can easily incorporate into your software engineering process. Just like when object orientation was new and we needed to incorporate OO concepts with practice, now we need a way to incorporate SOA concepts with current practices. Erl shows how to
• perform a service-orientation analysis,
• model service candidates that are derived from business models,
• design a service-oriented business process, and
• use Web services to abstract your business processes and logic.
Erl cross-references these high-level goals with the current state of Web services. He describes more than 10 Web services specifications in detail, including appropriate code samples, and draws models from these specifications to business needs.
Agile or otherwise, software engineering processes must be modified to incorporate methodologies such as service-oriented analysis and design. One key point that Erl makes throughout is the distinction between object orientation and service orientation. The names and architecture might seem similar, but they’re very different. Services in general promote decoupling throughout the engineering process (that is, design, development, testing, deployment, and usage). In OO, decoupling is done mainly at the design and development phases, and objects generally refers to finer-grained entities
(relative to the term service in service orientation). In service orientation, communication patterns between services take precedence over the internal architecture. A service could be written in Cobol and run on a mainframe, and it’s still considered a service if it can comply and interact with the rest of the enterprise’s SOA architecture.
Erl has certainly shown his in-depth knowledge of Web services and SOA yet again in his new book. I recommend Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design to anyone involved with designing and implementing an SOA initiative within an enterprise.”
- Art Sedighi [IEEE Software, March/April 2006]”
displaying 1-1 of 1
