Java Soa Cookbook [Paperback]

This book is intended for experienced Java developers and architects who need to know the details of SOA development with the Java programming language and associated technologies. It is not a very good big picture book on SOA. For that I recommend Service Oriented Architecture with Java: Using SOA and web services to build powerful Java applications, which was published in 2008, so it is still current in its approach.

To get the most out of this book the author assumes specifically that you are familiar with Java SE 5 or 6, servlets, JSP Enterprise Edition containers such as Glassfish, Enterprise JavaBeans, as well as JDBC, JNDI, EARs and WARs, and XML. In short, the author assumes that you have been involved in enterprise development using the Java technologies and APIs mentioned. If you have used web services but not recently, this book does help you get your feet back in the water. It is those that are complete novices that will get truly lost.

Parts of the book address strategy, design, and patterns, but largely it is a book that stays at a low level. A really good book on SOA design patterns is SOA Design Patterns (The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl). The author also talks about SOA and Ruby, Python, and .NET. However, it is not necessary to have a background in these languages since Java is specifically the language and environment that the author addresses.

Currently, the table of contents is not included in the product description, so I include that next:

Part 1: SOA Fundamentals
Chapter 1. Introduction to SOA
Chapter 2. XML Schema and the SOA Data Model
Chapter 3. Working with XML and Java
Part 2: Web Services
Chapter 4. Getting Started
Chapter 5. Web Services with SAAJ
Chapter 6. Creating Web Service Applications with JAX-WS
Chapter 7. Providing SOAP-Based Web Services
Chapter 8. RESTful Web Services
Part 3: Business Processes
Chapter 9. Service Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 10. Advanced Orchestrations with BPEL
Chapter 11. SOA Governance
Part 4: Interoperability and Quality of Service
Chapter 12. Web Service Interoperability
Chapter 13. Quality of Service
Chapter 14. Enterprise Service Bus

I would say that between this book and the other two that I mentioned, you should have a pretty good starting point on SOA/Java reading material.

I was really impressed how thorough this book is, it covered lots of materials. I was always looking for such a book that covers all sorts of topics in ONE SINGLE book, and this is the one. There are lots of books in the market about SOA, however, lots of them are pure talk, and they just fill pages to sell books and helps you very little in real life. This book is straight to the point; of course it does not give you everything, however, it is the best you will currently find in the market.

For the designers and architects, it gives you good introductions with examples showing how to apply SOA in real life. It touches on most subjects: such as Schema/Contract Designs, Governance, ESB, BMPL, and more.

From the programming prospective, this is a very rich book with lots of examples and discussions about the code. However, this book is written in a biased way to SUN's Glassfish & NetBeans, which I do not like. I hope in the next release he will normalize to eclipse and Tomcat. If you expect this book to cover AXIS2 or CXF, you are out of luck. This book assumes Java5+ and JAX-WS 2.1+ with lots of annotations.

I wish if there was sections about security in details, such as SAML, and integration with Spring Framework. I guess this will go in the next release years down the road.

I have just read this great book Again, I like add that one major shorting coming of this book that the examples do not exists online? Only snippet of code; not working example. I hope the author will do that soon because this is really a good book

This is a hands-on web services book. The title is a bit misleading. SOA gives the impression that you are going to learn about best practices and principles for designing an SOA at a relatively high level. It is really a cookbook for implementing java web services. There are some good (and some not so good) hints on high level SOA but there are many SOA theory and design books that will meet that need.

It's unbelievable how complete and detailed this book is. A solid foundation is given for the sake of thorough understanding and then the how-to for JAX-WS, JAX-RS. There is no fluff in this book. The author provides every alternative implementation, including XML over http if you care to go that route, and usually an explanation of advantages and disadvantages of each approach. You decide what works best for you. I benefited tremendously from the thorough XML coverage, including XPath, XSD, JAXB. I frequently would wonder while reading if I could simplify something to the point of triviality in Java and sure enough the solution is in the book. There's nothing you can't do.

I'm an experienced Java developer but you don't have to be to create or web service enable applications using this book. The author provides many alternative examples for every solution. You are bound to get one or two ways of doing any particular task to work. You should know some Java and be able to deploy a java web app in at least one web/app server. I prefer CXF and the book is geared toward the Sun implementation (you don't even need to add any web service jars to Glassfish) but if you are fairly comfortable with CXF now you will have little trouble doing anything in the book. I got almost everything working in Tomcat and Jetty using both Sun and CXF implementations.

I'm not a big fan of JAX-RS and Single Page Interface web apps but the one chapter on JAX-RS will give you all the information you need to implement it using JAX-RS or as XML over http or by implementing your own provider to use JAXB to simply treat it as a Java object in and Java object out if you want to treat it just like regular JAX-WS.

The author lets you decide whether you want to generate WSDL from Java or Java from WSDL (contract first) or something in between. I prefer Java first, and the book does give best practices for interoperability between Java and .NET and sample code for implementing .NET web services and .NET web service clients. I'm not a .NET developer but I had little trouble sending complex objects and collections (no maps) between my .NET and Java apps.

You can read the book end to end or you can jump right to the short chapters telling you how to get it done right now. It is an excellent book for both.