Service Oriented Architecture With Java 110
Martijn de Boer writes "The book has been written to provide the reader with a short introduction to the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture with Java. The book covers the theory and analysis from the start and is progressing to a more intermediate level slowly throughout the different chapters. This book has been written for software architects and programmers of the Java language who have an interest in building software using SOA concepts in their applications. The cover hints to a series called “From Technologies to Solutions”, and that is exactly what this book tries to do, it tries to explain the SOA technology with different case studies and a path for solutions for your applications." Read below for the rest of Martijn's review.
When I ordered the copy of the book, I was under the impression that I was required some familiarity with terms used in the world of SOA but I was rather fond of the easy explanation of terms in the first chapter. The first chapter starts off with a small introduction to the role of software architecture when thinking about a software project. The chapter covers alternatives to SOA and tries to get the reader onto the right path for the rest of the book.| Service Oriented Architecture with Java | |
| author | Binildas A. Christudas, Malhar Barai, Vincenzo Caselli |
| pages | 192 pages |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Martijn de Boer |
| ISBN | 1847193218 |
| summary | This book is an overview of how to implement SOA using Java with the help of real-world examples. It briefly introduces the theory behind SOA and all the case studies are described from scratch. |
Later on in the book different subjects pass, the first few chapters start off with the basics of using XML as a communication layer. The third chapter introduces the audience to different implementations of web services in the Java world including the most familiar names as Apache Axis, Spring and XFire. The reader will be shown and guided to the install process of these web services and is being shown around the process of working with the software. The pros and cons of every piece of software are shown when following the steps throughout the chapters.
The book ends with chapters providing case studies of real world examples of SOA and alternatives. I have found this to be the most informative section of the book when looking to make decisions on how to architect a software project as it provides several examples on when to use which aspect of SOA. The different case studies allow you to put some weight and foundations into your decisions. The last chapter of the book is basically a conclusion of what we have learned throughout the book and provides a clear summary of goals of using service oriented architecture.
The reader is expected to have understanding of Java to follow the examples throughout the book. Examples are demonstrated on Windows machines, but could be followed on any other platform as well without having the hassle of setting up a different environment. That is one of the advantages of Service Oriented Architecture with Java, because it basically can be ran everywhere.
When you work your way throughout the book, you will discover different clearly illustrated diagrams and other informational graphics. There are more than enough images to make this something other than a boring theory book, as the images often provide a better understanding of different explanations of architecture and setups.
The book covers a small setup with Apache Axis 1.3 and mentions to use this opposed to the more recent 2.0 version because more software is being implemented on top of the 1.x series of said web service. However because the reader is starting to learn about SOA, it would have been great to see some of the differences and read why 2.0 hasn't been adopted much yet. I would have liked to see a bigger comparison between those two versions, but as the authors point out, there is a great community for both versions which provides a lot more background information if you want to look further into the more technical information that isn't provided in the book yet.
This book is a good way to get your feet wet in using web services to build and architect powerful Java applications for your business. I am no big Java developer yet, and I needed this book to navigate through the different pieces of software available, it succeeded very well at that point. I was fond of the clear writing style, which has always been the case by books from Packt Publishing. The book also has been written in a logical order, putting case studies at the end of the book so they are better to follow. Most technical books I own are written in a way that allows you to jump from chapter to chapter in an order that you need them, but I found this book to be a solid line of information of which the difficulty grade builds up from beginning to end. As a developer and software architect I really appreciate how well this book has been written for this audience, it's almost as if it was written especially for me and the knowledge I had of service oriented architecture.
You can purchase Service Oriented Architecture with Java from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I'll admit... (Score:4, Interesting)
The only "service" I started from Scratch was the one to make the CD Tray eject every 5 minutes. It's been alot of fun pulling pranks on room mates and co-workers. However my co-worker had the profound idea of putting this on a handful of USB sticks and have it auto-install when plugged in to a computer. Then we toss a handful of these things in the parking lot, and whoever puts in an IT Request about it gets fired.
As for the book, I've never worked on a web service in Anything but VB, it handles everything we need it to do, which is very basic (pun intended).
Aside from the familiarity of Java, what benefits would Java offer for web services?
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I hope you are not from the UK. If you are then you would be guilty of an offense under the computer Misuse Act. What you are doing is intentionally putting malware(ie changing the operation) onto computer without the knowledge or permission of the user. If you did this in my company it would be groun for instant dismissal. The person using the USB stick could be in deep shit as well.
Humour bypass intentional.
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You know jack-shit, pal. Yes, Java on the UI has historically been kind of sucky, though it's getting a helluva lot better, but I've worked with Java for some utility programming, and it's pretty damned fast and certainly no more bloated than using Python, PHP or any other language of that ilk.
Re:I'll admit... (Score:4, Informative)
Optimized java can run at speeds close to c++, several orders of magnitude faster than scripting languages like PHP or python, and in some (admittedly rare) cases it can run faster than c++ thanks to optimizations performed at run time that could never be matched with precompiled code.
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I think it's more that Java web frameworks tend to be (or at least seem) very convoluted and heavy weight, rather than the Java language itself being slow (it's not).
The number of method calls you see in a typical stack trace, even in a "lightweight" framework like Spring, JUST TO SERVE A DAMN WEB PAGE (even static ones), is frankly ridiculous IMHO.
Perhaps I just suck at Java web apps (entirely possible, it's something I've consciously avoided really specializing in), but it always seems to take 5x longer t
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Almost anything is faster than PHP. Java runs a little faster than Python but not a lot if the code is of comparable quality and similar JITs are used. Java usually takes a little longer to launch also so not really good for short programs.
My biggest complaint though is that programming in Java is frequently retarded. The need for generics is a good example of adding complexity to try to fix bad language design and it still sucks sometimes. Upcasting and downcasting has serious issues that make certain cert
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Optimized java can run at speeds close to c++, several orders of magnitude faster than scripting languages like PHP or python, and in some (admittedly rare) cases it can run faster than c++ thanks to optimizations performed at run time that could never be matched with precompiled code.
http://www.joyrelax.com/ [joyrelax.com] massage tools-head massager,massage roller,massage ring
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Java is new in the Real Time space, it is true. Real-time, low memory footprint behaviour has never been a goal for core Java. So your comment makes you seem foolish. ("The iPhone is crap because it still won't brew my coffee, unlike this coffee machine over here!!")
If you want to spend your life reinventing the garbage collection wheel, you are welcome. I have been informed that any sizeable c++ app needs some sort of garbage collection algorithm.... I don't have enough c++ experience to factcheck that.
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At that time, there was Perl, and several Apache modules to avoid the problems of plain cgi.
Currently we have Ruby, Python, etc... and of course .NET, but AFAIK the Java/JEE environment is the more mature platform for that level of service.
Re:I'll admit... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'll admit... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have seen side by side performance comparisons of the same algorithms in java and c#. Java is at least twice as fast as c# and often as much as 2^3 times faster. The .NET architecture footprint, both in terms of disk space is also larger. In what way is .Net categorically superior?
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I have seen side by side performance comparisons of the same algorithms in java and c#. Java is at least twice as fast as c# and often as much as 2^3 times faster.
You know, you really have to provide references for such claims. I mean, I can say that I've seen the reverse - only I won't lie, and say that .NET version was only about 15% faster than Java, and even that was solely because of a peculiar heavy allocation pattern in the code that overstrained Java GC more than it did .NET GC; but I have no references either. Now, which anecdote is better?
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.NET is far superior for Windows desktop application development. Big surprise there ;-)
Also, for what its worth, C# is a far more advanced language now than Java. Probably because they care more about moving things forward than actively supporting people who want to pretend new versions don't exist for eons. (*cough* people who still only support Java 1.4 *cough*)
That being said, Java is still a far more versatile and community-oriented platform than .NET, in no small part to the "official VM/SDK" being
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I will certainly cede that .NET is the best language for windows GUI apps, in no small part to a well built drag and drop IDE (still has a few problems, why did they stop displaying keyboard shortcuts for common actions in VS2008?) And by advanced, I take that to mean, still evolving and not completely defined?
C# is not a bad language, I actually prefer some of its reduced restrictions compared to java. But its still evolving and its starting to suffer from "to many ways to do something less efficiently".
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They aren't entirely. Amazon allows teams to use any language they want. The majority use Java and C++. Most of the high performance parts use C++, not Java. And hardware there wasn't hard to acquire, so there was little impetus to the teams to go for higher performance vs just buying more boxes, even if you scaled out pretty widely. They were changing that when I left the company, but it was too short a time frame to rewrite working services in for the efficiency gains.
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Presumably, his office's IT dept. has some basic ground rules for users, such as, "Don't use flash drives of an unknown origin." In a case like that, this would not be a prank, but offensive defence of the system. Admittedly, firing does seem a little bit much, but I don't know the situation - perhaps this is a high-security environment, and it's been made clear that there's zero tolerance for things like this.
--- Mr. DOS
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Again, why not just lock the ports down? Then people couldn't break the rule even if they wanted to. Asking people not to do something isn't security, preventing them from doing it is.
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Because their job requires use of authorized flash drives?
--- Mr. DOS
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The company is too large to take on such a task, it was not locked down when the computers were deployed. There are about 400 employees for each IT Technician, so even remoting in to perform a lockdown would take too long.
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Aside from the familiarity of Java, what benefits would Java offer for web services?
Aside from having a huge library that helps you build your services, and a language that almost forces you to program well (A bad programmer can be bad in any language, but Java won't give you so many "liberties"), and... I guess you already see the point ;)
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The first to get fired is the IT guy that didn't disable autorun on the company's computers.
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And he's been long gone. We haven't actually tried this approach, it was just an idea. But there is nothing wrong with taking an offensive measure to test a companies defense. Certain users will require certain rights to a machine, you simply can't lock -EVERYONE- down. The CEO for example, must have unimpeded web access, and allowed to install his applications at will. If he wants to use MSN Messenger, by God, he is GOING to use MSN messenger. And everyone in his close circle will get some of that cake.
Now
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We allowed unimpeded internet access for a week and tracked all the people who use facebook once a day or more. They didn't get fired but they got a harsh warning. I mean you can call it underhanded but thats just the route you gotta take in the security biz.
Who cares if someone uses facebook once a day? Seriously, it takes 5-10 minutes that I spend on a compile or waiting for some other thing.
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Aside from the familiarity of Java, what benefits would Java offer for web services?
Compared to VB, one huge, huge advantage: Running on a server class operating system.
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Aside from the familiarity of Java, what benefits would Java offer for web services?
From my perspective, the mainstream application server frameworks are all Java-centric. JBoss, WebSphere etc.
There's a laundy list of features you get from these containers - clustering, connection pooling, caching, load balancing, distributed deployment, etc. .Net probably gives you all this too, but personally I prefer not to be locked into MS (Mono notwithstanding). The Java stuff is reasonably open, so you can migrate between app servers if you need to.
The mainstream Java IDEs all have plenty of support
I really have to get off my ass... (Score:4, Funny)
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You and me both. I have an idea for a book called: "Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword for more Buzzword" want to collaborate?
SOA anecdote (Score:5, Funny)
In Dutch SOA stands for "Sexueel Overdraagbare Aandoening", or Sexually Transmitted Disease. Someone at my office recently received the prestigious title "SOA Expert", which of course has led to very strange looks from the mailman when a package arrives for him.
It's been several months, and the joke still hasn't gotten old, which shows either the level of inappropriateness of the title in Dutch or the maturity of the people making the joke. (I'm guessing the combination of both)
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It's been several months, and the joke still hasn't gotten old, which shows either the level of appropriateness of the title in Dutch
Fixed that for you.
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We worked with a product who's acronym was JIS (when said, can not be differentiated with jizz, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4 [youtube.com] for definition). Everything had the lable JIS in it including the package names, documentation, server names, job titles (JIS Expert was one of them).
It took us about 6 months before we could say JIS expert with a straight face, at which point we inflicted this humor on our clients during boardroom meetings, it was hilarious watching them not trying to crack.
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right on! more like Same Old Anus for wont of a wanky TLA...
if you're going to design a service platform, design a freaking service platform - if you're going to build a service-based business, well then build a f*cking service-based business. if your legacy sh*t is sh*tty and holding you back from where you want to be well then rip it out. no need to apologise. no need to look to some enterprise-grade apologist for the magic bullet, there isn't one...
SOA is great but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Save Our Asteroids (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything that uses XML for RPC and has no concept of distributed transactions (Compensation) rightfully deserves to continue its steady march into irrelevent obscurity
SOA does not mean you have to use Web Services or XML over RPC to implement your services. A service is defined (by most people) as a piece of Software that follows some principles, like ... ... but you could use simple jars, dlls or hell... stored procedures if you want.
- be interoperable
- having a defined interface
- be reusable
-
Web Services just happen to be used because they are interoperable, define an interface,
And, btw, Web Services have a standard for distributed transactions [wikipedia.org].
As for SOA being irrelevant I dont't agree: the theory behind it is nothing really new. It just tries to define some common sense and document one of the many ways you can architect the software you write. It may not be the solution for everything, but for some business cases it's the right tool.
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That's like saying "OO Design" is a load of marketing bullshit. All SOA does is formulate the principles of "service-orientation" (as OO Design formulates principles of object-orientation). SOA is unique in that there are truly standard and interoperable implementations (WS-*) that support service-orientation.
In a sentence, SOA is the natural, evolutionary extension of object-oriented (and even aspect-oriented) design to the network, using open and widely-accepted XML standards as the distributed programmin
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Uh, you forgot the last line of your post:
"Get off my lawn, you damn kids and your rock and roll music, social equality and your high level programming languages!"
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SOA is just OOP or modular programming come again, with network latency added in. It's useful (I wouldn't build a huge website without it), but it should be easily understood by anyone who's done software design before. Its problem is people hyping it up like it's a new paradigm when it isn't.
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"I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die."
Wow! Nice stealth misogyny, dude!
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I read a paper on SOA once. It might as well be titled how to prevent small rocks from crashing into our Sun.
So you base your opinion on reading a paper on SOA once? Amazing.
Anything that uses XML for RPC and has no concept of distributed transactions (Compensation) rightfully deserves to continue its steady march into irrelevent obscurity
1. XML for RPC, why not? It's just a freaking format for transporting stuff. I know there are obvious problems with the bulk of WS-*, but there is nothing inherently wrong with using XML for RPC in certain contexs
2. Distributed transactions are an academic/vendor/architect astronaut white elephant, the solution for very extreme, fringe scenarios where simultaneous ACID properties over distributed reso
Exactly my thoughts. (Score:1)
Teaching SOA using a single language? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't the purpose of SOA to be platform and language independent?
I would think that a book on SOA that covers a single programming language is missing a key aspect of SOA.
I understand that if someone is writing an SOA application then the application can be written in Java only but I would expect the application to be tested using several languages.
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If you're concerned about interoperability, then you will obviously test with other languages. But if you're building multiple services in your company/business for your use, and you're all using Java, then I don't see any reason to use another language. Although, I'd prefer to use OSGi as then you avoid the whole XML thingy.
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Hopefully it's because you have cancer.
???
desktop applications (Score:1)
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TTL (Score:3, Funny)
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Like the applet not being able to regain keyboard focus in a browser running on Linux. That is, you click away to another window or something else in the browser, and then you click back on the applet. Unless you click in a text box, your key listener won't respond to input.
Yeah, I found out this one is a couple years old, as I've been trying to get my software to work.
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Java is fat and gay.
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Java's boyfriend coos: "Noooooo"
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Re:Java is a great *idea* (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately the implementation is poor.
Can you name a faster and more reliable implementation? Didn't think so.
Java held out the promise of write it once run it anywhere, but that promise has yet to be fulfilled as there are still differences from platform to platform that make developing in it a chore rather then enjoyable work.
If you use pure java code the cross platform stuff just works. Period.
Most of the problems are with the various implementations of both JIT's and VM's and mostly having to do with how things are abstracted eg: big -v- little endian, file access and those sorts of things.
What does this nonsensical gibberish mean?
The tons of lib's that are mentioned as a god send have their own problems as well but that has more to do with programmer quality then anything else, but even the well designed and written ones still overlook the JIT and VM problems and then you end up having damn quirky behavior that can take weeks to track down, hence the problem of everyone sending out a complete JRE with their program and you end up in JRE hell with 14 different versions of JRE's on your system.
If you target older jre's you'll get very good compatibility across the board. There used to be issues caused by Microsoft's JRE... but that's why they built it. If you target a bleeding edge ANYTHING, you're going to have compatibility problems.
I liked the IDEA of having SUN control Java because at least things would have been consistent but that failed as well with to damn many versions being released. Now we have everyone and their grandmother writing JVM's JIT's and JRE's and none of them do anything exactly the same which has thrown ever more variability into the mix and just made everything messier since suddenly you now had to install vendor X's JRE or VM because some fool decided that it made everything 1% faster and they JUST had to have it or alternatively it had a COOL name.
Why do you keep randomly throwing the acronym "JIT" everywhere? Again, you just poorly restated your earlier comment which isn't true and makes little sense.
I see the biggest problem with WEB development today as two things. 1. Lack of a statefull connection and 2. The proliferation of languages with linguistic and syntactual differences but little else to set them apart except a fan club. PHP, Ruby, Python, VB, Perl, all of them doing the same thing, serving the content.
1) ???? How does this affect Java in anyway? 2) ???? How does this affect Java in anyway?
The fundamental paradigm of the web is broken and needs repair badly. The solution is to split it, as I have said before, into two distinct camps, the Application Web and the Text and Pretty Picture Web because trying to mix the two has proven to be a miserable failure.
????? WTF
In summary,
FlyingGuy, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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Java held out the promise of write it once run it anywhere, but that promise has yet to be fulfilled as there are still differences from platform to platform that make developing in it a chore rather then enjoyable work.
If you use pure java code the cross platform stuff just works. Period.
Umm...no.
Write an applet with a keyboard listener that will play a sound clip when the spacebar is pressed. Put a button and a text area on there. Make the button play the sound for good measure.
Load the applet in firefox on windows. Hit the spacebar, hear the sound. Load the applet in firefox on Linux. Hit the spacebar, hear the sound.
Now put the cursor in the address bar.
On Windows, push the button, hear the sound. Press the spacebar, hear the sound.
On Linux, push the button, hear the sound. Press
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Hence the verification that the sound is working before clicking away. It's a little trick that professional call "verification of test setup."
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Hence the verification that the sound is working before clicking away. It's a little trick that professional call "verification of test setup."
It's not quite that easy. I have lots of apps where sound works fine on my laptop (Ubuntu 9.10), and others where it either doesn't work at all or all I get is white noise. Oh... and thanks for not being condescending, it really made my day.
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Ok, you are probably absolutely right. However, no one cares at all about applets. 99% of all written java code is pure server side and where it absolutely shines. If you are still bringing up applets when downtalking Java you have either not used the language in 10 years or you are just trying to put it in bad light on purpose.
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Just checked my 401K. Fidelities website requires applets for certain functions. Someone cares about applets.
So, the map of the conversation is now:
-The language works every.
-No it doesn't. Here is a proof of concept that you can try yourself.
-No one cares about that part of the language.
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You're blaming Java because Linux sound sucks?
I use Ubuntu daily and I don't think a day goes by without me cursing the names ALSA and PulseAudio.
Especially PulseAudio.
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Uhm, well normally I wouldn;t respond to such a vitriolic rant but I can't help myself because I am laughing so hard so here goes, fuck it I got karma to burn as they say...
Unfortunately the implementation is poor.
Can you name a faster and more reliable implementation? Didn't think so.
A faster more reliable implementation of?? I mean if you are going to yell at me at least say what you are yelling about.
Java held out the promise of write it once run it anywhere, but that promise has yet to be fulfilled as there are still differences from platform to platform that make developing in it a chore rather then enjoyable work.
If you use pure java code the cross platform stuff just works. Period.
Tell that to the rest of the people who have said the opposite. Not that they are supporting my argument, but they do seem to be.
Most of the problems are with the various implementations of both JIT's and VM's and mostly having to do with how things are abstracted eg: big -v- little endian, file access and those sorts of things.
What does this nonsensical gibberish mean?
Uhm I don't quite know what to say here. Are you saying you don't know what JIT means?
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It is your right to disagree, but the level of vitriol with which you wrote your post is really uncalled for. Might I respectfully suggest that you might be taking this a little tiny bit to personally? I understand passion about anything, but really you were pretty over the top.
Wow... pot, meet kettle.
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Not so much.
I do however completely agree with your sig.
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they are talking about Service Oriented Architecture and that translates to the WWW
This is factually wrong, and is a pretty good example of the sort of "talking about something you don't understand" problem that readers have with your post.
Is it? Cloud computing, it is all the rage, it is Software As Service, it is rent me version of software and then there is this [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia article that does seem to support my assertion. As to the main point of me being any of the rather derogatory you used, the reply was keenly about Java, less about SOA, and any amount of research does support my assertions that while Java is a great idea, in practice it is just as problematic as any other language as far as cross platform use goes and as for the vario
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they are talking about Service Oriented Architecture and that translates to the WWW
This is factually wrong, and is a pretty good example of the sort of "talking about something you don't understand" problem that readers have with your post.
Is it? Cloud computing, it is all the rage, it is Software As Service, it is rent me version of software and then there is this [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia article that does seem to support my assertion.
The fact that Web mashups make use of SOA does not mean that SOA 'translates to' WWW.
You could build a whole enterprise around SOA principles, without a single Web browser being involved. Possibly without HTTP being involved. One very robust way of doing enterprise SOA is for your clients and services to talk to each other over some asynch messaging protocol (JMS, Apache ActiveMQ, Websphere MQ, etc.)
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...The proliferation of languages with linguistic and syntactual differences but little else to set them apart except a fan club. PHP, Ruby, Python, VB, Perl, all of them doing the same thing, serving the content.
I suppose the world would be a better place if we could all just agree on the One True Language instead of using different languages for different jobs or thinking about problems in different ways or playing around with different ways of implementing ideas? The languages you mentioned (PHP, Ruby, Python, VB, Perl) have very little in common except being interpreted. Although I understand the desire for a standard, it's as hard to see everyone agreeing on a single programming language, and its hard to buy
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It would be impossible to get everyone to agree on the ONE language, that is a given, just look at the arguments of "pure" C -v- C++ -v- anything else so yes I agree. I think the problem boils down to project management mostly. I mean there is nothing generally wrong with any of them ( my own pet peeve is Python but I digress), each have their pluses and minuses so I think my chief complaint is walking into a project that is implemented in a smörgåsbord of languages, there is some Perl here, som