Enterprise Service Bus: Theory in Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)Chappell describes a highly promising but still speculative technology for connecting together enterprise-wide computations. It can also potentially be used to span different companies. Some of you may groan. Haven't we heard this already, several times? Remember the toutings of CORBA, Java's RMI, JMX, JMS, and the nascent Web Services?
Well, ESB draws upon often bitter lessons learnt with these earlier endeavours. CORBA was widely found to be too complex. RMI works only for tightly coupled systems, which do not scale well. So that became one reason for JMS, because it enabled loose coupling. But JMS is too low level. Web Services may indeed be promising, but face a danger of overspecifying a standard before enough practical experience is garnered.
ESB tries to subsume the best ideas from the above, and from other efforts. It promises loose coupling and an incremental rollout, amongst other things. The incremental ability may be key to getting a small scale project approved and implemented, due to its minimal investment.
You could think of ESB as taking the ideas of the JMX management console a step further. Plus, ESB can use JMX as a subsidiary technology.
Chappell also offers nice visual component schematics that could be used to represent and perhaps even assemble an ESB network. If this indeed is possible, it would be tremendous. Akin to the 1980s, when MicroSim offered a graphical version of Spice, with electronic parts availabled from a menu.

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Large IT organizations increasingly face the challenge of integrating various web services, applications, and other technologies into a single network.The solution to finding a meaningful large-scale architecture that is capable of spanning a global enterprise appears to have been met in ESB, or Enterprise Service Bus.Rather than conform to the hub-and-spoke architecture of traditional enterprise application integration products, ESB provides a highly distributed approach to integration, with unique capabilities that allow individual departments or business units to build out their integration projects in incremental, digestible chunks, maintaining their own local control and autonomy, while still being able to connect together each integration project into a larger, more global integration fabric, or grid.

Enterprise Service Bus offers a thorough introduction and overview for systems architects, system integrators, technical project leads, and CTO/CIO level managers who need to understand, assess, and evaluate this new approach. Written by Dave Chappell, one of the best known and authoritative voices in the field of enterprise middleware and standards-based integration, the book drills down into the technical details of the major components of ESB, showing how it can utilize an event-driven SOA to bring a variety of enterprise applications and services built on J2EE, .NET, C/C++, and other legacy environments into the reach of the everyday IT professional.

With Enterprise Service Bus, readers become well versed in the problems faced by IT organizations today, gaining an understanding of how current technology deficiencies impact business issues. Through the study of real-world use cases and integration patterns drawn from several industries using ESB--including Telcos, financial services, retail, B2B exchanges, energy, manufacturing, and more--the book clearly and coherently outlines the benefits of moving toward this integration strategy.The book also compares ESB to other integration architectures, contrasting their inherent strengths and limitations.

If you are charged with understanding, assessing, or implementing an integration architecture, Enterprise Service Bus will provide the straightforward information you need to draw your conclusions about this important disruptive technology.

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Exploring IBM SOA Technology & Practice Review

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(More customer reviews)I was an IBM Fellow and Chief Architect for IBM Software Group. I helped lead the team that produced many of IBM's SOA products, as well as author many of the industry specifications. I am currently a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
This book is excellent for teams starting SOA projects, or moving to the next level in SOA and Web services. IBM's products appear complex due to the depth and breadth of functions. This is not the case. The most common question in my customer briefings was "What do we do next, and how do we get started." IBMers presenting the big picture and next steps is not scalable; there are only so many briefers.
This book codifies the most important information that teams need. The authors have extensive experience working on projects with customers, and enabling successful projects. Writing this information in a book will allow other teams to succeed based on best practices and hard won experience for early adopters.
This book is a critical resource for any SOA/Web service team

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Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a major technology trend focused on making corporate information technology (IT) an enabler of business flexibility and innovation. While SOA is not the unique province of any single vendor, IBM has taken a leadership position in the industry and is actively helping organizations in many industries be successful with SOA. This book will help you migrate your existing computing infrastructure in the direction of a service oriented architecture using IBM technology and services. In Exploring IBM SOA Technology & Practice, IBM SOA expert Bobby Woolf explores IBM's vision for success with SOA. Woolf starts by describing the reasons an organization should consider adopting SOA. Issues and challenges faced once you decide to adopt SOA are examined. Guidance is given on how to prepare, select good SOA projects, and how to structure a committee to manage all SOA projects in an organization. Woolf then moves in for a closer look at the nuts and bolts of SOA including the IBM SOA Reference Architecture, the suite of IBM products/services (e.g., IBM WebSphere) used to implement that architecture, and SOA application development practices. Vital topics such as lifecycle management and governance are covered. At the "Member's Only" Web site, you will find direct links to a rich array of SOA videos, Webcasts, white papers, and other SOA resources to help your projects succeed. This book is a key resource for IT professionals and business people who work closely with IT and want to learn how to use SOA to make their corporations more successful and it shows how they can work with IBM to achieve that success.

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SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design (Theory in Practice) Review

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(More customer reviews)The book starts very well and you become very excited about what the future chapters will hold. I must say that the writer is an excellent writer and knows how to captivate you, but that only lasts as long as what he's talking about entertains. The chapters that a few here seemed to have liked were the best parts of the book, but even they were average at best. I was a little dissapointed that he gave examples of complex objects being returned from service calls, but never addressed methods that used XML instead of complex objects and in turn majority of the versioning section was based on versioning and problems that occur when dealing with complex objects. I did like the opinions he gave on using web services as means of realizing SOA. For those who didn't read the book, he doesn't think much of web services because of the many different standards organizations and the many versions of standards that are used to implement web services - these issues create interoperability problems when you're ultimately looking for high interoperability with SOA.
Overall, this book maybe of interest to a business person or IT manager trying to understand what SOA is, but it's not that great for technologists looking for implementations that may fit their system. Three Stars!!!

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This book demonstrates service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a concrete discipline rather than a hopeful collection of cloud charts. Built upon the author's firsthand experience rolling out a SOA at a major corporation, SOA in Practice explains how SOA can simplify the creation and maintenance of large-scale applications. Whether your project involves a large set of Web Services-based components, or connects legacy applications to modern business processes, this book clarifies how -- and whether -- SOA fits your needs. SOA has been a vision for years. This book brings it down to earth by describing the real-world problems of implementing and running a SOA in practice. After defining SOA's many facets, examining typical use patterns, and exploring how loose coupling helps build stronger applications, SOA in Practice presents a framework to help you determine when to take advantage of SOA. In this book you will:

Focus squarely on real deployment and technology, not just standards maps
Examine business problems to determine which ones fit a SOA approach before plastering a SOA solution on top of them
Find clear paths for building solutions without getting trapped in the mire of changing web services details
Gain the experience of a systems analyst intimately involved with SOA
"The principles and experiences described in this book played an important role in making SOA at T-Mobile a success story, with more than 10 million service calls per day." --Dr. Steffen Roehn, Member of the Executive Committee T-Mobile International (CIO) "Nicolai Josuttis has produced something that is rare in the over-hyped world of SOA; a thoughtful work with deep insights based on hands-on experiences. This book is a significant milestone in promoting practical disciplines for all SOA practitioners." --John Schmidt, Chairman, Integration Consortium "The book belongs in the hands of every CIO, IT Director and IT planning manager." --Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group; Executive Director, SOA Consortium

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