The folks at Packt Publishing sent me a copy of the following book and asked me to review it for them. I hope you find it useful and informative.
Title:
SOA Approach to Integration
Language: English
Paperback: 300 pages
Release Date: November 2007
ISBN: 1904811175
Authors:
Matjaz B. Juric, Ramesh Loganathan, Poornachandra Sarang, and Frank Jennings
Intended Audience:
“The target audience for this book are architects and developers, who are responsible for setting up SOA for integration for applications within the enterprise (intra-enterprise integration) and applications across enterprises (inter-enterprise integration or B2B).”
Overview:
The book does a good job of covering and tying together a broad range of material with respect to the title topic. It provides a varying degree of detail in different areas, for example a light treatment of SOA in chapter 2 yet a more in-depth look at XML in chapter 3. The intended audience is noted as architects and developers so this variance may make sense but it seems inconsistent at times. Overall I thought this was a good book for anyone interested in the topic and a good reference for those who have been tasked with an integration project.
Chapters:
1.) Integration Architecture, Principals, and Patterns – covers a wide variety of concepts including types of integration including data, application, process and presentation. It also speaks to layers of integration such as communications, brokering, routing, transformation and others. The authors touch on various technologies in the integration arena, for example, database access, message oriented middleware, remote procedure calls, transaction monitors and more. The chapter finishes up with a quick overview of the integration process, various practices activities and patterns.
2.) Service and Process-Oriented Architectures for Integration – talks a great deal about the concepts and standards that make up Service and Process Oriented Architecture. It is not an in-depth tutorial on either subject but is a good reference for the standards associated with them and why they are well suited for integration.
3.) Best Practices for Using XML for Integration – is closer to a tutorial on XML than a description of the architectural rationale and implications of it with respect to SOA. Since part of the target audience is developers the level of detail in this chapter is not un-warranted. This chapter includes a comparison of JAXP API’s and shows a number of XML schema and XSL stylesheet examples. It also speaks in reasonable detail to validation, security, encryption and performance considerations with respect to XML.
4.) SOA and Web Services Approach for Integration – steps more deeply into the area of web services and again much of it is directed to developers as opposed to architects. It contains a good overview of various patterns and contains some guidelines on their usage. The chapter contains a light review of web services for B2B and EAI and then a more detailed description and examples of interoperable web services, WSDL and WS-I.
5.) BPEL and the Process-Oriented Approach for Integration – speaks in more detail about BPEL and what the authors refer to as “the process-oriented approach to SOA-based integration.”. This chapter addresses the usual suspects of choreography, orchestration and complexity in a clear fashion. It then goes into more depth on writing BPEL processes and works through a fairly complete example.
6.) Service and Process-Oriented Approach to Integration Using Web Services – gets to the heart of the notion of using SOA for integration by delving into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This chapter covers the ESB at the appropriate level of abstraction for an architect and touches on key areas such as mediation, transformations, communications, transactions and security.
Conclusion:
I enjoyed the book and felt it delivered on the topic of SOA Approach to Integration. Trying to target both architects and developers is a difficult task but readers from either area will find something useful in this book. It is not the definitive work on SOA and Integration but it does a good job of tying together a broad range of material and will be a welcome addition to anyone’s technical library.
