"Open Source SOA" book review

Open Source SOA
Jeff Davis
Manning


To be honest SOA has been some kind of black box for me. I believe that we all run into many technologies’ shortcuts that we don’t really know. I use to read everything what looks interesting in ‘IT-way’ – you never know when it is going to be useful while chit-chat with boss ;)


Book is split in five chapters.:

I Chapter
“History and principles’. I see your face – “im not interested – lets move on”. I thought the same – but this chapter is really great view on technologies which are main parts of SOA. Additionally author made not so short (30 pages) review why he chose these technology solution instead the other – so reading this chapter would prevent later questions – “Why Synapse instead Servicemix?”

II Chapter
“Assembling components and services”. This chapter is about using SCA with Apache Tuscany. Examples are shown in ‘step-by-step’ style, so its easy to understand that there are many ways to solve each problems.

III Chapter
“Business Process Management”. BPM is called by Jeff Davis as “secret sauce of SOA”. In my opinion it’s the most interesting chapter of this book. BPM is shown from jBPM solution point of view. Subject is well-covered with code examples and eclipse jbpm plugin screenshots so we clearly understand what author tries to show us.

IV Chapter
“Event stream processing, integration and mediation”. Chapter 4th contains review on event processing with Esper (with EPL language) and ESB implementation with Synapse.

V Chapter
“Enteprise Decision Management”. Drools – engine for defining rules - is main actor in this chapter.

In my opinion “Open Source SOA” is a great – but not so easy to read – book. Huge subject made every page full of technology information but this makes it useful for beginners and professionals. There are a lot of examples in a book…but that’s not all! You can download source codes from Internet (150mb!) which covers each chapter. Additionally you can find readme.txt file for every part which shows how to run it, so basically it is easy to start – and its worth your time for sure.