Product Description

This is a comprehensive tutorial that teaches fundamental and advanced SOA

design principles, supplemented with detailed case studies and technologies

used to implement SOAs in the real world.

***We'll have cover endorsements from Tom Glover, who leads IBM's Web

Services Standards initiatives; Dave Keogh, Program Manager for Visual Studio

Enterprise Tools at Microsoft, and Sameer Tyagi, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun

Microsystems. All major software manufacturers and vendors are promoting

support for SOA. As a result, every major development platform now officially

supports the creation of service-oriented solutions.

Parts I, II, and III cover basic and advanced SOA concepts and theory that

prepare you for Parts IV and V, which provide a series of step-by-step "how

to" instructions for building an SOA. Part V further contains coverage of WS-*

technologies and SOA platform support provided by J2EE and .NET.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115796 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 792 pages

From the Back Cover

"Service Oriented Architecture is a hot, but often misunderstood topic in IT today. Thomas articulately describes the concepts, specifications, and standards behind service orientation and Web Services. For enterprises adopting SOA, there is detailed advice for service-oriented analysis, planning, and design. This book is a must read!"

–Alex Lynch, Principal Consultant, Microsoft Enterprise Services

"One primary objective of applying SOA in design is to provide business value to the solutions we build. Understanding the right approach to analyzing, designing, and developing service-oriented solutions is critical. Thomas has done a great job of demystifying SOA in practical terms with his book."

–Rick Weaver, IBM Senior Consulting Certified SW I/T Specialist

"A pragmatic guide to SOA principles, strategy, and best practices that distills the hype into a general framework for approaching SOA adoption in complex enterprise environments."

–Sameer Tyagi, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems

"A very timely and much needed contribution to a rapidly emerging field. Through clarifying the principles and nuances of this space, the author provides a comprehensive treatment of critical key aspects of SOA from analysis and planning to standards ranging from WS-specifications to BPEL. I'll be recommending this book to both clients and peers who are planning on embracing SOA principles."

–Ravi Palepu, Senior Field Architect, Rogue Wave Software

"Finally, an SOA book based on real implementation experience in production environments. Too many SOA books get lost in the technical details of Web Services standards, or simply repeat vendor hype. This book covers the really hard parts: the complex process of planning, designing and implementing service-oriented architectures that meet organizational goals. It is an essential companion to any software developer, architect, or project manager implementing–or thinking about implementing–a service-oriented architecture."

–Priscilla Walmsley, Managing Director of Datypic

"Thomas Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design is as good an introduction to service-oriented architectures as one could wish for. In a single volume, it covers the entire topic, from theory to real-world use to technical details. The examples are superb and the writing is wonderfully clear."

–Ronald Bourret, Author, "XML and Databases"

"Finally an SOA book which gets to the point with real world answers and examples. Erl guides you on a real world SOA journey. From architecture design to industry standards, this book is well written and can be easily referenced for everyday use. When embarking on your own service orientated adventures, this is the book you want in your bag."

–Clark Sell, Vice President, CSell Incorporated

"Organizations struggling to evolve existing service-oriented solutions beyond simple Web Services now have an expert resource available. Leading the way to the true service-oriented enterprise, Thomas Erl demystifies the complexities of the open WS-I standards with detailed practical discussions and case studies. Erl's depth and clarity makes this work a superb complement to his Field Guide."

–Kevin P. Davis, PhD., Software Architect

"This book is an excellent guide for architects, developers, and managers who are already working with or are considering developing Web Services or Service-Oriented Architecture solutions. The book is divided into four sections. In the first section the fundamental technologies of XML, Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures are described in detail with attention given to emerging standards. The book is well written and very thorough in its coverage of the subject. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in enterprise level service architectures."

–Adam Hocek, President and CTO, Broadstrokes, Inc.

Additional praise quotes are published at: www.soabooks.com/reviews.asp

The foremost "how-to" guide to SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is at the heart of a revolutionary computing platform that is being adopted world-wide and has earned the support of every major software provider. In Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design, Thomas Erl presents the first end-to-end tutorial that provides step-by-step instructions for modeling and designing service-oriented solutions from the ground up.

Erl uses more than 125 case study examples and over 300 diagrams to illuminate the most important facets of building SOA platforms: goals, obstacles, concepts, technologies, standards, delivery strategies, and processes for analysis and design.

His book's broad coverage includes

• Detailed step-by-step processes for service-oriented analysis and service-oriented design

• An in-depth exploration of service-orientation as a distinct design paradigm, including a comparison to object-orientation

• A comprehensive study of SOA support in .NET and J2EE development and runtime platforms

• Descriptions of over a dozen key Web services technologies and WS-* specifications, including explanations of how they interrelate and how they are positioned within SOA

• The use of "In Plain English" sections, which describe complex concepts through non-technical analogies

• Guidelines for service-oriented business modeling and the creation of specialized service abstraction layers

• A study contrasting past architectures with SOA and reviewing current industry influences

• Project planning and the comparison of different SOA delivery strategies

The goal of this book is to help you attain a solid understanding of what constitutes contemporary SOA along with step-by-step guidance for realizing its successful implementation.

About the Web Sites

Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture books are supported by two Web sites. http://www.soabooks.com provides a variety of content resources and http://www.soaspecs.com supplies a descriptive portal to referenced specifications.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Thomas Erl is the world's top-selling SOA author and the Series Editor of the Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl  http://www.soabooks.com/ His first two books, Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major software organizations, such as IBM, Sun, and Microsoft. Thomas is also the founder of SOA Systems Inc. http://www.soasystems.com a company specializing in SOA training and strategic consulting services with a vendor-agnostic focus. Through his work with standards organizations and independent research efforts, Thomas has made significant contributions to the SOA industry, most notably in the areas of service-orientation and SOA methodology. Thomas has had numerous articles and papers published on Web sites and in industry trade magazines, and is a speaker and instructor for private and public events. To learn more, visit http://www.thomaserl.com

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Awful
Really appalling introduction to SOA and for my money if you want to learn about SOA then Enterprise SOA (Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, Dirk Slama) is far better.

I also question the whole approach to SOA that Erl takes, the enterprise services approach with lots of upfront design is not a style of SOA that I think can work in many places. I'd therefore recommend that if you do read this book you actively seek out other opinions, including searching for views on "entity services" and how SOA can be used within an agile process.

Is this War and Peace for Software Architects?
Service Orientation claims to be the solution to the problem of delivering large complex software systems that enhance organizational agility, that integrate .NET and Java systems, and systems from different vendors while maximising re-use. It's a big topic and this is a huge book running to over 750 pages. So, unless you're in the habit of reading War and Peace, this is probably the largest book that you're likely to be caught reading on the train. Its size is partly a consequence of the size of the topic but it's also a result of the breadth and thoroughness of the book, which covers both the theory and practice of SOA. The "theory" includes the historical context of SOA, the problems SOA attempts to address, the current and future standards, the tenets of service orientation and the common misconceptions about Web Services and SOA. The "practice" includes the design strategies for SOA and the technology platforms that support the standards. The book will be of most practical use to senior development managers, architects and business analysts having to make technology choices about system architecture and system integration.

In my experience most of the other books on SOA and ESB are of little practical use as they either cover only the early implementations of XML Web Services (JAX-RPC) or focus too much on a single vendor's proprietary solutions and are of limited usefulness as a guide to building real-world systems (assuming one of your objectives is platform independence).

Unlike other books on the subject this book is focussed on the delivery of SOA using vendor-independent and standards-oriented solutions. It covers both the already well-established request-response web services, (so-called first-generation web services technologies), and the more recent web services standards that implement more advanced "message exchange patterns" (such as send-and-forget and publish-subscribe) and more demanding scenarios such as reliable delivery, transactions and secure transmission, functionality that has previously only been provided by platform-specific and proprietary solutions such as JMS and TIBCO.

Unfortunately the chapter on platform support for the standards, which covers the .NET and J2EE platforms, is too brief to be of any real value. Plus the differences between different J2EE vendors' implementation of the standards aren't mentioned at all. So if you're involved in vendor selection the book will help you work out the right questions to ask but won't help you much with the answers. This perhaps reveals the author's background as a consultant who has been directly involved in the definition of the web services standards. This is the both the book's main strength and at the same time a weakness. Nonetheless it's well worth the (large amount of) time it takes to plough through the myriad of examples.

SOA explained, without the hype
This is a great book on SOA. It's the first book I found that really explained the concepts in a clear and concise way. It gives an overview of what SOA really is and what not and then goes on to explain how to design an SOA.

This book is especially helpful for those who have been wrestling with Web services (SOAP) as a technique, but haven't seen any of the SOA promises yet. Thomas Erl can probably explain to you, where you've gone wrong.