 [Larger view] | Web Services Patterns: Java Edition
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Average user rating:  | |
 Could have been much better... | |
| I've been architecting Web Services since before they were called Web Services, so I was really hoping to come away with some new insights based on the other book reviews here. Unfortunately, this book fell short in several ways. Pros: I liked the idea of WS patterns - it's a good idea and he did an ok job, I also liked how he tied the example application to the text. Cons: the writing style was a little dry and repetitive, very few of the patterns actually applied to how clients interact with services (something most of us that implement services are interested in), all of the examples used rpc/encoded SOAP messages which is pretty much an obsolete practice, and the author seemed to have much less Web Service experience than pattern experience. For example, in the Partial Population Pattern he recommends that clients use "keys" to identify parts of the message that they want returned. A more XML-friendly approach would be to use a limited form of XPath rather than keys, thus allowing for more flexibility. The pattern also assumes that the response schema allows variations in the message to be returned, something that I don't believe he discussed. | |
| Painful to read, 30% of not obvious patterns | |
| Some of the fonts chosen remember me of some books I read 15 years ago. There are bad recommendations like promoting a distributed architecture in the "Physical Tiers Pattern". The chapter describe how you can communicate between two processes with RMI or CORBA.
The only two patterns that were not obvious for me were the "Faux Implementation" and "Partial Population", but few strategies are presented for implementing them. In overall, the author seems naïve and not very experimented. | |
 Translating from Java OOAD to Web Services | |
| This book is a good description of how to bridge traditional OO designs into a web services world. It takes a Java perspective and describes quite well where the differences are in a distributed component model such as WS. It describes very basic GOF patterns, how they have been adapted to J2SE and J2EE, and how these patterns need to be modified to fit into a WS environment. If you have a Java/OO perspective and some J2EE background building web apps, this book is a very good way of understanding how you will have to modify some approaches to move to distributed, message-based systems with adapters and coarsely-grained data transfers. |
