SOA Design Patterns (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl)

Just wanted to warn potential buyers that this book is actually a companion to the author's book "SOA Principles of Service Design". The product summary doesn't mention that and I was a bit unhappy when I read on page 4 that many design patterns are "covered separately in SOA Principles of Service Design, a companion guide for this book." In other words, this book won't make sense unless you have already read, or are reading, his other book.I will try to write a real review when I get a chance.

This book is probably the strongest of the Erl books to this point.It has a lot of solid information on a par with J2EE Core Patterns.There are no major specifics, but for a pattern book, this is really not a requirement.However, as in most Erl books, the diagrams are really pretty useless. If two scenarios are to be explored, it makes sense to place them side-by-side and actually add some explanatory text to the diagram.However, this book is essential for the Thomas Erl Certified SOA Architect.The best approach for the certification is to make summaries of the required content for the exam, and then ignore the book except to update your summary.

The book SOA Design Patterns by Thomas Erl offers a very clean and straight-forward explanation of to the many different facets and options of implementing SOA.I particularly enjoyed Chapter 13: Service Security Patterns and Chapter 20: Service Interaction Security Patterns. Discussed intelligibly in these chapters are security standards such as WS-Security, SAML, WS-BPEL (which goes towards data integrity), XML Encryption and XML Signature. It was for me a good bridge between security concepts I have applied in different areas (such as PKI, Kerberos, etc.) and how to implement these same solutions in a service-oriented architecture.In addition to the two chapters dedicated to security, I also found the following sections interesting from a security perspective.Chapter 19-3: Atomic Transaction ServicesAll tasks, or web services, within a transaction must be followed by an acknowledgement to indicate that the task completed. If no such commit is received by task coordinator defined for the transaction, all the tasks within the transaction can be rolled back (or other mitigating actions can take place.) The web service specifications WS-Coordination and WS-Atomic Transactions can be utilized to employ this safer method of transaction management.Chapter 19-5: Compensating Service TransactionThis allows for a web service to have an "undo" event, defined at the task level, which can protect the encompassing transactions against individually failing web services. These tasks can operate asynchronously, and the other inline web services are notified when an exception occurs so that they can handle the event appropriately without sacrificing the entire transaction. This helps build robust exception management and defend against resource starvation attacks.Chapter 18-9: Reliable MessagingThe method helps ensure message delivery. Messages can be tracked via acknowledgements similar to TCP/IP packets, and persist messages during failure conditions. Reliable messaging can help protect against data integrity and service availability attacks.Chapter 12-5: Partial ValidationAt first this sounds like disabling some of the data validation performed by a web service, which is definitely discouraged (remember, all input is evil), but instead what this does is use a language like XPath to filter out unnecessary data from a message so that only a subset of the data is validated; the omitted data is dropped off before the validation phase. This can be used as an optimization technique.Chapter 18-6: Service CallbackThis allows for asynchronous web service calls, which can be helpful for web services that can take a long time to process and respond. A callback address is provided so that the web service can be polled at intervals to see if it is ready to return data. This can also be used to protect against resource starvation attacks.While the book is sometimes light on implementation details (the author maintained platform agnosticism throughout) it definitely provides a good starting point for managers, coders and architects by including sample SOAP headers, messages and WSDL definitions. What I also appreciated is that keywords are followed by the page number in parenthesis to easily look up the definition of that term. Lastly, not only is the book filled with useful information, but the inside covers themselves is a pattern list reference.The book may be a challenge to read cover to cover, but is an excellent reference. It is a bookshelf staple for anyone implementing, or interested in, SOA.

If you are assembling a SOA team of any size - one of the first immediate challenges is establishing clear communications.How to quickly and efficiently solve the challenge of adopting a set of common terms, a common lexicon for concepts, and a library of reusable architectural patterns?SOA Design Patterns is an excellent reference for a team to adopt as an initial stake-in-the-ground. Later you can evolve your own library of patterns - extending upon this excellent body of work.Much of this material will be known by some team members - but the thoroughness of the text provides a great level-set when assembling a team of mixed levels of experience.

Based on the positive reviews, I was hopeful that this book would provide lots of insight into practical approaches to designing and architecting SOA solutions. Unfortunately, I found it lacking. It seemed that many of the patterns were something like: "Problem: New versions of your service have compatibility issues with old versions. Solution: Make the new version more compatible." Obvious, and you don't need 5 pages and 4 diagrams to explain it. I'm sure there's lots of actually useful advice buried in here, but I was not patient enough to bother mining it.

The kindle version of the book lost the proper formatting. Can you make sure it has the same format as in the print version? It is so hard for navigate the contents.

SOA Books by Thomas erl are the best books in the market.........I have purchased all the books and have read them all....Great Books!

Exellent book

As all the books from Thomas Erl, this one is great.Everything is well documented and there is a clear methodology behind that as for any pattern book is essentially to easily memorize patterns.

Excellent

「よく出来ました」というのが感想である。SOAに関する様々な見解を流行の「パターン」という概念に嵌め込み体系化した書籍と言える。ただ、これだけではSOAは実現できない。ヒントにはなる。またパターンごとの関連性が明記されているので、SOA検討作業の網羅性を高める際のチェックリストにも使えるかも知れない。ただ1つ1つのパターンが「そりゃそうだよね」という域を脱しないものばかりなのである。例えば「ルールを収集して一元管理する」ことをパターンと言われても「そりゃそうだよね」としか言えないのではないか？それがSOAなのですか？と言いたくなるパターンが多い。（私の洞察が浅いだけなのだろうか？）もちろん筆者は豊富な経験に裏打ちされた上でパターンと称しているのだろうが、これだけのボリュームを費やした割にはpoorな内容といわざるを得ない。逆によくこれだけのボリュームに仕立て上げたものだと感心する。よく出来ました。