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In their current incarnation as an implementation of the service-oriented architecture (SOA), XML web services are made up of a host of loosely coupled standards. Among them, we can find the traditional SOAP, WSDL and UDDI specifications as well as the WS-* specifications, which comprise, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-BusinessActivity, WS-BPEL, etc. On the one hand, these emerging standards aim at better decoupling the variety of concerns that make up the web services technology stack. On the other hand, developers and architects often find themselves stuck in front of this big maze of documents.
Five IBM collaborators have teamed up in order to make this entire technology stack accessible to web services-savvy people and to show how it is implemented by XML web services. The fourteen very well-written, yet sometimes overly tortuous, chapters elegantly introduce how the discovery and negotiation vertical layers orchestrate the transport, messaging, description, quality of service and business process horizontal layers. The authors finally put the dissected technologies at work with two concrete case studies that illustrate how these technologies build up into a consistent whole.
I would definitely not recommend this book to XML agnostic people and novices. Moreover, the content is intentionally not targeted at developers as it does not contain extensive and detailed code coverage of the different specifications. As a consequence, this book is best suited to consultants, architects and technical managers willing to better understand the web services platform architecture.
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