Web Services, Service-Oriented Architectures, and Cloud Computing (The Savvy Manager's Guides)

By Douglas K. Barry

This book begins with a high-level example of how an average person in an organization might interact with a service-oriented architecture. As the book progresses, more technical detail is added in a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558609067
• ISBN13: 9781558609068
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

No Perfect Answer

From the start, I was happy to see that Barry wasn't one of those old school guys who tried something 10 years ago that didn't work, and had sworn off a similar endeavor forever as impossible. He's been there - he just has moved on, just as computing and software technologies have changed and made a lot of our past experiences less relevant today. Neither is this book a recipe for perfection requiring strict adherence. His regular admonition to build for flexibility and his willingness to point out the flaws in conventional beliefs is a welcome departure from most architectural guides. I particularly enjoyed the discussion on middle-tier architectures and data caching. As service-oriented architectures mature, it's highly unlikely they will succeed if all data access occurs in the enterprise tier. An SOA will encourage new applications and more sophisticated services, which will place even more stress on data access and responsiveness. Plus, the SOA infrastructure itself will require non-enterprise data for state management, diagnostics, object mapping and other functions that must be stored in the middle tier. This is a topic that cannot be avoided for an SOA that fulfills its long-term promise to the business. Barry's book is the only one I have found that deals with this reality in a straightforward, unemotional way. Given that most of the SOA failures are likely to occur in the planning and organiation of the team or teams involved, I'm happy to see this kind of book now, when most companies are in the early stages. Let's let the standards firm up and the early implementations guide the "best practices" books which will no doubt come soon.

5 Stars from the author of _XML:A Manager's Guide_

As a fellow author of a book targeted at managers, I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of their needs. Doug has done an admirable job of meeting these needs for Web services. This is a book for managers that want to have sucessful Web services projects.Doug starts by motivating the need for Web services with a utopian view of a near future business trip. Then he gives a thorough account of Web services technology basics at a level that even managers whose technical days are long in the past can understand. He ties this account back to the utopian business trip, showing how Web services overcome the technical obstacles to making it a reality.This book really shines in its extensive treatment of how managers can make their Web services projects successful. As a technologist, I have a tendency to underestimate the impact of "soft" project management issues, but Doug has not made this mistake. His years of experience clearly show through in his thoughtful and comprehensive treament of the forces pushing managers to use Web services, the potential obstacles to project completion, and how to overcome them.

Just Right For Management Types

Frankly, I feel that some reviewers misunderstand the purpose of this book. In my opinion, for the right person, this book is a gem! Any of us who have had the challenge of explaining new and difficult concepts to managers who left technology back in the COBOL days or never were technologists should be grateful. As technologists, we forget just how much intimidating jargon we use and how many underlying assumptions we make when we explain things. As a software architect once said to me, "if I had more time, I'd make it simple." Clearly Barry has taken on the challenge of making it simple, and such efforts are incredibly valuable.

Best overview book I've seen

There must be hundreds of books on Web services, most of them with chapters that read like alphabet soup (UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, etc.). I've read quite a few of these books and it's awfully easy to get lost in the details. Douglas Barry's Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, The Savvy Manager's Guide, does something else: it gives you a genuinely useful high-level view. Barry makes a very important distinction: Web services (the term we hear about so much) are connections. Services are what these connections deliver. What is important in the long run are not the connections (Web services) but the goods they will provide (services of many kinds). As Barry and many others see it, the future of software is in the services that will be used to plug information (data) and programming into service-oriented applications. Managing both the connections and the services will be a principal task of IT in the coming years, and it's Barry's contention that it can best be addressed by developing a service-oriented architecture. Much of the book is given over to discussing the nature of software architecture, what it means in the case of services, and how you would go about deciding what kind of architecture to use. This seems like esoteric stuff, but Barry does a very good job of removing excess jargon and inserting real-life analogies to clarify the topics. The author also uses his own experience and point of view to humanize what could be a mind-numbing onslaught of abstractions. I'm particularly happy that he discusses the difficulties of implementing Web services and a service-oriented architecture - a reality check that's sorely missing from many other books.Personally I might quibble with his assumption that the technical difficulties of Web services and particularly the problem of arriving at standards will shortly be resolved. But this is, ultimately, a matter of timing. That Web services are going to be important and probably pivotal for software is generally accepted. Barry does an excellent job of explaining what's involved, why it's important, and how to approach it-necessary background information for just about everybody involved in IT. Highly recommended

A Great Overview of Web Services!

I've always been a fan of Doug Barry. In the early Nineties Doug Barry focused on OO Databases. He produced a series of reports that compared every feature of every OO database. For awhile these magisterial volumes were the bible for any large company that wanted to buy an OO database. In this case, Doug presented the big picture by organizing the categories a team would use to analyze products, and then covered the details by presenting tables that showed exactly which features or functions each product had.Doug's latest book is Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures: The Savvy Manager's Guide.(Morgan Kaufmann, 2003). This book is written for architects and managers who are trying to figure out just what Web Services will mean for their organizations. It focuses on describing just what is involved in a Web Services Architecture and then explores the various options companies face as they think about how they might implement such an architecture. A quick glance at the contents gives you an idea of the scope:I. Service-Oriented Architecture Overview1. A Business Trip in the Not-Too-Distant Future2. Information Technology Used in This Trip3. Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Services4. Forces Affecting the Adoption of Web Services and Other Integration Techniques5. Growing Impact of Web Services6. Service-Oriented Architectures and Beliefs about Enterprise Architectures7. Starting to Adopt a Service-Oriented ArchitectureII. Managing Change Needed for a Service-Oriented Architecture8. Change Will Happen9. Tips for Managing Change Issues During DevelopmentIII. Creating Service-Oriented Architectures10. Architectures at Each Stage of Adoption for Web Services11. Architectural Options12. Middle-Tier Architectures13. Revisiting the Business Trip in the Not-Too-Distant FutureIV. Compendium of Software Technologies14. Additional Specification Details15. Quick Reference GuideEarly on, Barry introduces a simple, high-level diagram of an architecture, and then follows through by using it throughout the text with great effect. Many complex options are easily compared or contrasted by a glance at one of the diagrams.Web Services depend heavily on XML and its various standards and Barry confronts that head on by providing an extensive reference guide to all the acronyms that we keep seeing, and that various specifications that tie them together. Anyone new to the world of XML would find it valuable just to buy this guide to get an overview of the world of XML. Most, however, will read the architecture sections, and be grateful that they can flip to the back whenever they want to check on an XML standard of which they are unsure.Given his nice treatment of middleware and the OMG XML standards (XMI, MOF, MDA, CWM), I was sorry that Barry didn't do a bit more to explain the OMG's Model Driven Architecture and explain how it could play a role in the evolving world of Web Service Architectures. This book covers a complex and rapidly expanding