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Author/s : Douglas K. Barry
Publisher : Morgan Kaufmann
Category : Web Services and SOAP
Review by : Valentin Crettaz
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
Service-oriented architectures (SOA) have been around for quite some time now (think DCOM, CORBA and Jini). Their main goal is to provide support for connecting various heterogeneous enterprise services together. As inter-/intra-enterprise collaboration and integration become increasingly vital, industrial and research consortia have recognized the need for building a new generation of SOA. Indeed, the author presents web services as the most likely set of technologies that is going to impose itself as the next generation of SOA.
If you expect tons of XML and
Java listings, this is not a book for you. This book is primarily targeted at managers in need of evaluating how their companies could benefit from web services. It clearly identifies the driving and restraining forces for adopting web services and explains how to manage such a technology change. The author voluntarily remains at a high level of abstraction and does not delve too much into details. However, he does a good job of illustrating the various components that interact within a distributed system and how (and why!!) web services could be integrated into such a system. As a concrete example, the author discusses how a business traveler could take advantage of web services (travel, car and hotel reservations; personal, manager's and wife's calendars synchronization; on-the-fly itinerary; etc).
In summary, this book provides a valuable introduction to SOA in general and web services in particular. I would have expected more than 200 pages on this exciting subject, though.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk