Understanding Enterprise SOA
Understanding Enterprise SOA gives technologists and business people an invaluable and until now missing integrated picture of the issues and their interdependencies. You will learn how to think in a big way, moving confidently between technology- and business-level concerns. Written in a comfortable, mentoring style by two industry insiders, the book draws conclusions from actual experiences of real companies in diverse industries, from manufacturing to genome research. It cuts through vendor hype and shows you what it really takes to get SOA to work.
Intended for both business people and technologists, the book reviews core SOA technologies and uncovers the critical human factors involved in deploying them. You will see how enterprise SOA changes the terrain of EAI, B2B commerce, business process management, "real time" operations, and enterprise software development in general.
What's Inside:
- How SOA streamlines portal development and EAI
- Rapid integration with partners
- Effective BPM and real time management
- How to design, develop, run, and secure an SOA
- Real-world SOA deployment scenarios
Review By: Dale Perry
07/08/2010This book provides a very basic overview of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The general components of SOA are sufficiently covered to allow someone not at all familiar with the concepts to understand them. The book does not go to the level required to actually implement the specific technologies, but that is not its intent.
The authors touch on many different possibilities and scenarios for the deployment and use of SOA within the business community. The general concepts and ideas behind SOA are introduced and discussed using a very simple case study. The descriptions and applications of SOA are on a level that a typical businessperson can grasp, but an IT specialist would require more information and details to implement the SOA concepts.
The material flows well, and the numerous diagrams reinforce the discussion points well. The final chapters use the case study to discuss how an actual SOA might be implemented and some of the management and personnel issues associated with SOA.
I was looking at the book from a testing and quality assurance perspective, but it provides no direct insights into these areas. There are many implications—some references to security and management--but not sufficient to plan any quality control/testing efforts.
The authors do a reasonable job of presenting both the positive and negative aspects of the various aspects of SOA, but I still found the book to be a bit overly optimistic and pro-SOA. Many of the examples of possible applications of SOA technology, although completely plausible and reasonable, do not address the possible problems associated with converting or migrating existing applications to an SOA-based process. Even if building a new application, I think there are many issues yet to be resolved. And, having been in the industry for over thirty years, I do not think the underlying Web service components are up to speed yet (granted, several of these are mentioned by the author). The pro-SOA viewpoint seems to overly minimize some of the critical issues.
The book provides a good general overview of SOA concepts, and it confirmed one suspicion I’ve held for some time: SOA is just a fancy buzzword for applications built using Web services.