SOA-Based Enterprise Integration: A Step-by-Step Guide to Services-based Application 1st Edition

As a developer currently working on an integration between a mainframe system and distributed Java applications I find this book to be incredibly relevant and well written. This is a great book for enterprise level integration in general and focuses on the use of ESBs. There are great examples in the book between client/server programming in Java and C (the author likes to mix it up), XML Schema design, SOAP envelopes, creating WSDL documents and much more. I think this is a great read for anyone who is working at an enterprise level that is going through integration work just as I am.Definite 5 stars.

The first 8 chapters are very well written to describe the evolution of integration technologies. Sockets, RPC, and the like are discussed.Chapters 11 through 14 are a dense recap of the current uses of web services, with descriptions of SOAP and the XML language. I found this to be the most valuable part, since I went in without knowledge on these topics.My negative on this are the 2 or 3 chapters discussing Enterprise Service Buses and Mainframes, where the author exclusively discusses IBM products and their medley of acronyms. Seems to be completely different from the generic discussions in the rest of the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the author needed to pump some IBM juices in there to get other IBMers to peer review.There's little information present on recent developments in infrastructure platforms as a service, such as MS Azure or Amazon's ESB.

Before buying the book, I read 2-star as well as 5-star reviews. I've read a sizable portion of the book already. As a serious practitioner in the industry, I will recommend this book to all practitioners. Depending on your situation and the project, it may satisfy your needs to quite a high level.Integration is a subject not widely covered. Particularly, Services-oriented integration (SOI). This book does a pretty good job overall.

I'm reading this book for a course. I'd give it a higher rating except that it's so IBM biased it's ridiculous. This is made worse by the fact that i don't like IBM.

Read the first 7 chapters - not much new, but thorough and well written. So far I thought this book was pretty good.Then I came to chapter 8 Enterprise Service Bus and noticed how pro-IBM it was. Sentences like "The most powerful ESB available today is IBM's websphere Message Broker" and "Of, course, IBM has the most complete and comprehensive product line in the area of connectivity line", got me thinking if I can trust what's written in the book. If you know anything about ESBs you probably know that these statements are very debatable. Read gartners opinion for exampleThe book would have got better rating if it was platform agnostic. I don't want to pay money to reading IBM marketing.

When I first looked at this book (after opening the package from Amazon), I thought it would be perfect... it's not a hefty 1000-page cookbook... and seemed like it would be just the perfect level of detail to rein in the broad topics into something coherent. In fact, the book does a decent job with the overall picture, but has some major flaws in style, presentation, and bias that renders it a groggy, often un-informing, experience. I stuck with it, because I had no alternative at hand, and a tight timeframe, so I can speak as a reviewer that has actually read the book.The Good: This book contains a decent overview of SOA components and does tie them together in a good overall picture.The Bad (part I): This book was written by an IBM Senior Architect. The technical editor for the book is an IBM Architect. The forward was written by an IBM Fellow. The back cover contains endorsements from two IBMers, one of which is the VP for WebSphere Marketing. Much of the book contains unbiased information on industry standards. However, much of the rest of the book is an over-the-top promotion of IBM products. For example, the capstone of this work is the chapter on Enterprise Service Bus. This chapter reads like glossy marketing literature for IBM products at best and like an informertial at worst. That chapter is only 30 pages long, but uses the word "WebSphere" 24 times by my count. Conversely, the non-IBM Weblogic is mentioned exactly 0 times in the same chapter, and rarely throughout the rest of the book. This book calls IBM's WESB "the prime example" of an application server based ESB and goes on to list, in bulletized form, its "features and advantages". In another section, the author states, "IBM offers the most complete product lines in this area."The Bad (part II): This book is poorly presented. It can't decide if it is a 40,000 ft overview or a detailed description of various technologies. For example, SOAP is covered in 22 short pages. That's obviously not enough for anything more than an explanation of what it is, how it is used, why it's good, and a few examples. Yet the author tries to dive into the structure of a SOAP message to the point of who-cares detail for a book like this. In the 22 pages covering SOAP, for example, the author states FIVE TIMES that if the header element is present, it must precede the body element.In addition, the author uses a highly verbose and repetitive style. It often seems that about 20% of the book is either telling you what it's going to tell you or telling you what it's already told you. The book could have contained the same amount of useful information in about 200 pages. This overly verbose and repetitive style gives the book a sense that the author, a PhD, does not know how to communicate effectively with lesser intellects and frequently overshoots his simplification. The result is that the work often, but inconsistently, reads a bit like a "for dummies" type of book.

Great book providing the evolution of enterprise integration tools starting from RPC, DCOM, CORBA for distributed applications, to modern application servers and SOA tools. I gained a good understanding of how such tools are deployed to address integration issues among enterprise COTS tools and environments so that tools and technologies from diverse vendors can co-exist in an enterprise.

Author walks you through different patterns used to integrate over a period of time, discusses the pros and cons of every pattern. It helps understand how SOA addresses many integration related challenges. I like it.

Das Buch möchte einen "Step-by-Step Guide" für SOA-basierte Anwendungsintegration bieten. Das gelingt nur bedingt.Beschrieben wird hauptsächlich die Historie der Entwicklung von verteilten Anwendungen. Von Sockets über RPC, Object Request Broker und Messaging bis hin zu Web Services (leider nur SOAP, kein REST) und ESBs. Diese Erläuterungen sind sehr gut gelungen und einfach sowie verständlich zu lesen. Hervorzuheben sind noch die Kapitel zur Integration von Mainframe-Anwendungen (CICS, IMS) und Packaged Applications (wie z.B. SAP), da diese Themen bisher in anderen SOA-Büchern nicht vorhanden sind.Das Problem: Obiges ist eigentlich nicht das Ziel des Buches. Es handelt sich um eine Step-by-Step Historie statt einem Guide. Daher ist das Buch insbesondere für jüngere Semester (z.B. Junior IT Consultants) sehr gut geeignet, um sich eine Überblick über die Evolution von verteilten Systemen zu verschaffen. Ältere Semster, die mit Technologien wie Sockets oder CORBA groß geworden sind, werden kaum neue Informationen erhalten.Kritisch ist noch anzumerken, dass das Buch hauptsächlich IBM-Produkte erwähnt (da es von IBM-Angestellten geschrieben wurde) und diese Produkte oft besser geredet werden als Konkurrenz-Produkte, was für ein neutrales Buch nicht angemessen ist. Negative Folgen für den Inhalt des Buches hat dies jedoch nicht.Fazit: Drei Sterne, da das Ziel des Buches eigentlich nicht erreicht wurde. Mit einem anderen Titel (z.B. Evolution der Technologien zur Entwicklung von verteilten Systemen) hätte ich fünf Sterne gegeben...

The author states that this book fills a missing gap on enterprise integration but the only gap it appears to fill is probably yet another slot on the "integration bandwagon" on how to make money fast on stating the obvious and repeating known information explained elsewhere - a long time before!The hardback copy is small and the text is tightly fit with limited diagrams. There is a note that suggests the diagram is coloured but none of them are so this looks as though the publishers reduced the size and appeal of the book to reduce cost.There are far better books on the market and this book certainly doesn't fill the gap!