About the Book

Motivation for this Book

The Web services trend is obvious and ubiquitously featured - there are numerous articles, books and conferences on the subject.

The first wave of enterprise-scale applications and projects leveraging the benefits of the technology is on its way. However, there still is lack of experience in the field. Technical decision makers are struggling: what elements of the technology to apply and how to do so. This is a variation of the well-known "chicken and egg" problem: no project without an architectural decision, no architectural decision without experience, no experience without a project. Our book provides guidance and closes the gap we perceive between vision and reality.

The book is more than a basic introduction to Web sevices concepts; it targets project practitioners and their everyday problems. For example, we attempt to provide tangible artifacts such as qualification checklists to assist with the decision as to wheter Web services are an appropiate solution for a given business scenario. Many illustrations simplify the understanding of the topics at hand. Sample project deliverables including source code demonstrate the concepts we introduce.

Who Should Read this Book?

Our main target audience is technical decision makers and staff in state-of-the-art Web development projects. Due to a rolebased approach, the audience not only includes IT architects and developers, but also project managers and system administrators. The book will enable members of these professions to take architectural decisions regarding Web services more consciously and to accelerate the implementation of Web services-based solutions.

The book can also be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of general software engineering and application integration courses.

The Perspectives Metaphor

Our approach to structuring the book is to make use of a metaphor also used by IBM WebSphere Studio development tools and several software engineering methodologies: each chapter provides one Perspective, viewing the subject matter from a different angle, wich allows the different members of our target audience to easily navigate the book.

For example, there is an Architecture Perspective aiming at the technical decision makers on the project. Programmers will work mainly with the Development Perspective; project managers will focus on the Business and the Engagement Perspective. The Operationa Perspective mainly targets system administrators.

Each chapter starts with a quotation from one more fictious members of the target readership - IT architect, project manager and so on - giving their opinion about Web services and their expectations for the chapter.

Key Topics

• Seven - sometimes controversial - Perspectives on Web services, covering the entire project lifecycle from opportunity identification to design, develop-ment and deployment
• Business drivers and scenarios for Web services solutions
• Understanding the Web services building blocks XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI
• Service-oriented architectures and related non-functional requirements, architectural decisions and patterns
• J2EE sample implementation platform: IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer and IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 5
• Apache SOAP 2.3 and JAX-RPC programming through JSR 109 and Apache Axis; interoperability between Microsoft .NET C# and Apache SOAP
• Runtime topologies for Web services solutions, service deployment and Web services security
• Project management considerations
• Best practices for the design of Web services solutions
• Trends such as Grid computing and the semantic Web

• Project-centric approach including lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid
• Checklists to decide whether Web services are an appropriate solution to a given business problem
• Guide to W3C recommendations and other Web services specifications
• Hands-on instructions and full source code for a complete reference implementation
• Many rich illustrations, website support and extensive pointers to other Web resources

Table of Contents

 Take a look at the Table of Contents (pdf)

Sample Pages

 Sample Pages - Chapter 1 

Customer Reviews