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Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform: JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies Review by Kevin Judd
Great book for the right reader.
This book provides a very good, well ordered, high-level overview of architectural decisions in a Web Services application. If you have knowledge of J2EE technologies, and want an intro to the Web Services paradigm, this is a good book.
This is not a programmer's reference nor an introduction to J2EE technology.
The book is disciplined in maintaining a high-level overview; most code snippets are purposely contracted to show only the relevant features being discussed. This keeps the code snippets focused, but means that if you are looking for a sample SOAP document that does X, you'll need to look elsewhere.
I liked the organization of the book. Rather than organizing the book around an annotated sample application, the authors
take a more didactic approach; Chapter 1 gives an intro to Web Services, Chapter 2 reviews the alphabet soup of J2EE development and shows how various components either use the technologies or are connected by them.
The next five chapters each take one component of the Web Services domain and review in detail the architectural
decisions to be made in designing that component. In the chapter on Service Endpoint Design, for example, the authors review
two approaches to designing a service interface definition; should you first design a Web Services Definition Language or
should you first design the Java Interfaces? The Chapter on XML reviews the pros and cons of various XML parsers and the use of XML transformations for services which must interact with numerous systems. There are similar chapters reviewing Client design, Integration with the J2EE platform, and Security.
In the last chapter, the authors review their reference application and walk through their decisions.
Throughout, the authors give good advice on the judicious use of various technologies, use of Design Patterns, and designs that will give good, reusable code. The authors several times discuss patterns that will make the application simpler to understand and build upon.
All in all, this is a well written treatment that I highly recommend.