Book review: Service Oriented Architecture with Java

Z Jacek Laskowski - Wiki Projektanta Java EE

Service Oriented Architecture with Java by Vincenzo Caselli, Binildas A. Christudas, Malhar Barai (Packt, June 2008)

Service Oriented Architecture with Java is a book about all and nothing. It's not very technical book and the subject of SOA in Java is barely scratched. There's everything you might find useful at your first day in your job as a SOA architect, but SOA Java programmers will likely find it hardly bearable. My interest in reading the book was to find a thorough explanation of what SOA means and how one can build SOA architecture with Java tools and projects. Well, there's a chapter about Java specification - JAX-WS - and projects like Apache Axis, Spring-WS and XFire (Apache CXF), but they're merely introduced and presented with very simple examples. Examples are meant to be simple, but not that much. The first chapter "The Mantra of SOA" is way too long and quite boring. The authors used lots of acronyms that might easily confuse like C/S. I certainly was. The second chapter "Web Services and SOA" makes a cut from the previous one. It's quite an interesting chapter with thought-provoking explanations, but it ends leaving a reader with "What! That's it?!". "The more you have, the more you want" I'd say and after the first chapter I really needed more. No code till the chapter 3. "Web Service Implementations". It was the very first time I could "taste" Spring-WS and XFire. Together with JAX-WS and Apache Axis, the samples of each were so simple that I barely noticed a change. Definitely not much to digest. JBI and OpenESB were mentioned very lightly as well. With other specifications - SDO and SCA - in the chapter 4. the book left a bad taste in my mouth. I could read a lot about different Java specifications for a successful SOA project, but enumerating them only would make no difference. That's not what I expected from a book "for JAVA programmers or architects who are interested in implementing SOA concepts to their applications" as the book's cover announces. I think the book aimed at Java programmers but eventually paved the way to SOA architectures for architects or business people. Too much "theory behind SOA" (quoting the book's cover again). The last 2 chapters are about imaginary projects to compare EAI and SOA approaches. They didn't draw my attention fully again. Although the book was not the one I had read if I'd have known what it was about before I must admit I have no regrets. A slightly over 150 pages are read very nicely and just because I found a few points about hub and spoke vs ESB architectures interesting (see pages 132-133) it was worth my time. Perhaps, yours won't be lost either.