Oracle Modernization Solutions: A practical guide to planning and implementing SOA Integration and Re-architecting to an Oracle platform Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is excellent source for anyone who is involved in modernizing the legacy software application with Oracle SOA Suite. It details the comprehensive approach for any scale modernization using Oracle SOA.

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Oracle Modernization Solutions shows you how to modernize a legacy mainframe application using the modernization approaches of SOA Integration and Re-architecture. The book is unique in that it identifies a specific set of implementation tools and targets the Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware as the end architecture. Legacy system architects, project managers, program managers, developers, database architects and decision makers who own mainframe and heterogeneous systems, and are tasked with modernization will all find this book useful. The book assumes some knowledge of mainframes, J2EE, SOA, and Oracle technologies. The reader should have some background in programming and database design.

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Web Services: Principles and Technology Review

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(More customer reviews)This book stands out from the vast array of contemporary SOA and Web services literature in many ways:
1) It presents business context and technical requirements for Web services design on an adequate level of detail.
2) It provides important historical insight without putting the reader to sleep.
3) It covers relevant related work such as e-business, EAI, and networking as needed, unlike most other Web services books.
4) It separates abstract concepts such as messaging from implementation technology such as JMS appropriately, but shows the connections when needed.
5) It builds up a non-trivial example that demonstrates how the various specifications fit together, many unique illustrations help to digest.
6) It has non-trivial exercises that will deepen your understanding.
7) The author's has a hype-free, vendor-neutral writing style and is very experienced in his field.
It always is a good sign if as a reader I want more... so I would also have been interested in the author's view on the ongoing WS-*/SOAP vs. REST debate, and about adoption of the presented concepts and technologies in the industry (tools and project usage); for example, UDDI does not seem to have much traction these days. Maybe something for the Website accompanying the book, which will also have additional material for students and lecturers?
As a practicing IT architect, I have helped many companies to transform their existing applications into Web services-based SOAs. As a book author, I have captured my own experience with the technology in writing. As a researcher, I now investigate many of the architecture design issues the author points out. Still, I find this book to be very educational and informative; I highly recommend it for practitioners, students, and researchers that want to understand the big picture as well as technical rationale and details behind the various concepts and technologies. Those of you that believe some WSDL-to-Java wizards or RESTful POX/HTTP calls are all that is required for successful enterprise development and integration, please do have a look as well - you will begin to appreciate that there is more to the picture!

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The first textbook to focus on Web Services – the wave of the future for Web-based distributed computing.

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Enterprise Rails Review

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(More customer reviews)Dan Chak has written a really excellent introduction to enterprise web application architecture, and a worthy candidate for your technical bookshelf.
Calling it "Enterprise Rails" is a bit misleading, though. Rails only makes fleeting appearances. There's a great introduction to Rails plugin writing, which rightfully urges developers to move any decorator code to plugin modules. He talks a little about segmenting class files along Physical, Logical and Service boundaries, the point of which I have yet to understand completely. And there's a chapter on pushing Rails' application-layer polymorphism down to the data layer, which is good advice, but more on that later.
The bulk of Enterprise Rails is devoted to building a solid data layer. Again, good advice. The Rails team decided that referential integrity and validation belongs in the application layer, which Chak contends is dangerous (and I believe him). However, this is where things start to get a little hairy - enforcing referential integrity and validation in the data layer requires an early and continued adherence to SQL, and Chak makes it clear that any old SQL won't do: it's PostgreSQL or nothing.
This makes fully half of the book a dissertation on SQL domain description language from the Postgre perspective, domain data, third normal form and other data layer topics. I have greatly enjoyed the introduction to Postgres DDL, but it wasn't exactly what I expected from a Rails book.
The last few chapters are mostly about Service Oriented Architecture (which I suspect is why most people buy this book) and caching. Chak shows why he's an expert in enterprise software architecture here. But again, he takes a decidedly anti-Rails approach, emphasizing ActionWebService and XML-RPC. This is not without reason - nearly every language has an XML-RPC library. But ActionWebService, as Chak notes, isn't part of core Rails any longer.
REST is quickly reviewed, then mostly dismissed. There's a cursory example of a RESTful service. ActiveResource, Rails' useful core module for REST-oriented SOA, is never mentioned.
Pretty much every time Rails comes up in Enterprise Rails (which, as we've seen, isn't often), it's an opportunity for Chak to take it down a peg. Well, Rails deserves it. But I think that slapping the word "Rails" on the book cover is has more to do with marketing than anything else. This is really a tale about data modeling for the enterprise, with an emphasis on Postgre, told by an expert.
I'd say that this is required reading for enterprise developers, but don't take the "Rails" part of the title too seriously.

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What does it take to develop an enterprise application with Rails? Enterprise Rails introduces several time-tested software engineering principles to prepare you for the challenge of building a high-performance, scalable website with global reach. You'll learn how to design a solid architecture that ties the many parts of an enterprise website together, including the database, your servers and clients, and other services as well.
Many Rails developers think that planning for scale is unnecessary. But there's nothing worse than an application that fails because it can't handle sudden success. Throughout this book, you'll work on an example enterprise project to learn first-hand what's involved in architecting serious web applications.

With this book, you will:

Tour an ideal enterprise systems layout: how Rails fits in, and which elements don't rely on Rails
Learn to structure a Rails 2.0 application for complex websites
Discover how plugins can support reusable code and improve application clarity
Build a solid data model--a fortress--that protects your data from corruption
Base an ActiveRecord model on a database view, and build support for multiple table inheritance
Explore service-oriented architecture and web services with XML-RPC and REST
See how caching can be a dependable way to improve performance

Building for scale requires more work up front, but you'll have a flexible website that can be extended easily when your needs change. Enterprise Rails teaches you how to architect scalable Rails applications from the ground up.

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Web Development with TIBCO General Interface: Building AJAX Clients for Enterprise SOA Review

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(More customer reviews)The book provides very little in the way of examples on how to implement the TIBCO GI classes and components outside the standard methods covered in samples from the TIBCO web site. For example, the section on matrix functions has virtually no in-depth examples or information on how to use the libraries to do basic operations like working with the current matrix record. The author frequently says that the API documentation is very good, but the API lacks any examples on how to actually use the libraries and the book adds almost nothing to that lacking.
The samples are so similar to those available from the web site that they are of little use. The references to the code examples in the book are often listed as "see the sample". The book often provides no information on where in the samples to look, so finding where the author is referencing a particular function in the sample code is painful at best.
If the author spent more time covering what the API and standard docs do not provide, the book could be useful, but without that it is almost a collection of scattered thoughts and not a cohesive reference tool.
TIBCO GI is an excellent product and deserves a solid reference, but this book does little to fill that need. Hopefully, a second edition will be of more use and not a waste of money.

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Web Development with TIBCO General InterfaceBuilding AJAX Clients for Enterprise SOAAnil GurnaniUse TIBCO General Interface to build web applications with state-of-the-art performance and usabilityTIBCO General Interface provides powerful tools and a framework to craft AJAX-based web applications that rival desktop applications in performance and usability. This is the only book that offers developers thorough guidance for using TIBCO's award-winning open source tools to build interactive, high-performance GUIs and integrate them with leading server-side technologies. Experienced TIBCO General Interface developer Anil Gurnani focuses on applying General Interface in real-world production applications and presents numerous working examples that can easily be adapted for your existing sites and applications. You'll first walk through the fundamental concepts and techniques needed to build powerful General Interface clients. Next, you'll dive into specific back-end technologies, mastering them through start-to-finish case study projects. Finally, drawing on his own experience building enterprise-class General Interface applications for the financial services industry, Gurnani illuminates advanced topics ranging from charting and collaboration to application optimization. Coverage includesIntegrating XML and XSL with TIBCO General Interface's XML Mapping utilityExtending General Interface widgets with object-oriented JavaScriptIntegrating with web services, databases, portals, and messaging systems: start-to-finish case study sample applicationsIntegrating General Interface applications into service-oriented enterprises using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Using OpenAJAX Hub (TIBCO PageBus) to simplify collaboration among GUI components Anil Gurnani's book greatly augments the available information for developers learning and using TIBCO's General Interface. …With this book, you will quickly be building General Interface applications, faster and easier than ever before.—Michael Peachey, co-founder of General Interface and Director of User Experience, TIBCO SoftwareAnil Gurnani has written extensively on technical topics for many prestigious magazines. He is an adjunct at SCPS, New York University, where he teaches advanced courses focused on web and enterprise technologies including Core Java, JEE, and .NET. He is also an expert at managing large, global, multifunctional teams to architect and build complex distributed systems with a portfolio of front-end applications and back-end services.About the CD-ROM The accompanying CD-ROM contains all source code files for working examples. Updated code and additional resources are available on a companion website.Web Development/Ajax

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Java Soa Cookbook Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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.

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Java SOA Cookbook offers practical solutions and advice to programmers charged with implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in their organization. Instead of providing another conceptual, high-level view of SOA, this cookbook shows you how to make SOA work. It's full of Java and XML code you can insert directly into your applications and recipes you can apply right away. The book focuses primarily on the use of free and open source Java Web Services technologies -- including Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 tools -- but you'll find tips for using commercially available tools as well.Java SOA Cookbook will help you:



Construct XML vocabularies and data models appropriate to SOA applications
Build real-world web services using the latest Java standards, including JAX-WS 2.1 and JAX-RS 1.0 for RESTful web services
Integrate applications from popular service providers using SOAP, POX, and Atom
Create service orchestrations with complete coverage of the WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) 2.0 standard
Improve the reliability of SOAP-based services with specifications such as WS-Reliable Messaging
Deal with governance, interoperability, and quality-of-service issues

The recipes in Java SOA Cookbook will equip you with the knowledge you need to approach SOA as an integration challenge, not an obstacle.

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