Designing Web Services with the J2EE(TM) 1.4 Platform : JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies (Java Series)

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Summary: HIgh Price
Review: High Price hence haven't bought it yet. If it was around 30 bucks I would have bought it.

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Summary: Contents is different from what the title says.
Review: I do not recommend this book to any programmer. Its more suited for business or executive person to decide on what technology to use. Hardly any programming snippets.

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Summary: A good architectural approach to Java web services...
Review: If you're looking for a good architectural treatment of web services in Java, you'll want to look at Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform - JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies by Inderjeet Singh, Sean Brydon, Greg Murray, Vijay Ramachandran, Thierry Violleau, and Beth Stearns (Addison Wesley).

Chapter list: Introduction; Standards and Technologies; Service Endpoint Design, XML Processing; Client Design; Enterprise Application Integration; Security; Application Architecture and Design; Glossary; Index

As with most books put out by Sun, this is an authoritative guide. The quality of the material is high, and you are getting it "straight from the source", as they tout their books. While they cover the subject well, it's not the type of book that the hard-code developer geek would want. It seems to target more of the system architect position... the person who would be responsible for designing the overall approach to a system and specifying the technologies to be used. There is some code, but not much. It's also not a tutorial approach, either. But when you get done, you should have an excellent understanding of how web service architectures are designed using Java and technologies supported by Sun.

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Summary: waste money
Review: there is an online free copy, and the content is not useful for building a real web services application

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Summary: Straightforward architectural overview of Java Web Services
Review: This book is primarily geared towards reader at the architectural end of the spectrum. Code samples are few and far between, and the illustrations are primarily UML. That's not a bad thing, it's just a matter of what you are looking for. Though even for an architecture work I would like to see a little more code (thus the four stars instead of five.)

The book starts with XML basics, then spends the largest portion of the book on SOAP and JAX-RPC, then finishes off with an excellent chapter on security issues. There is some mention of mobile, but nothing in depth.

I recommend this book to Java architects who want to learn more about this topic. Front line engineers will probably want to concentrate on API centric books on Java Web Services, most likely from O'Reilly.

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Summary: Great book for the right reader.
Review: 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.

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Summary: Another authoritative reference by Sun
Review: Web Services is still a field in its infancy. But like a squalling child, it beckons for attention. This book is an authoritative guide to WS, if you plan on using J2EE 1.4 as the underlying platform.

The authors offer an end-to-end description of what WS entails. Of necessity, you have to plunge through a thicket of standards: XML, SOAP, WSDL, JAX-RPC, WS-I etc. While doing this, remember what is pointed out early in the book. Web Services goes far beyond publishing dynamic web pages. Those are meant for manual viewing by humans [wetware]. So, in essence, programmers only have to write part of the code. Web Services is fundamentally about applications talking to each other across a net, in a very loosely coupled way. So collectively, programmers have to write all the code for both sides of the interaction.

Since this is an official Sun book, it gives a good treatment of EJBs and their containers. I guess it would have been too much to expect even a passing reference to a well regarded competing container, jBoss. [Sigh.]

There is one little burr in the book. It seems like most places where "Java" appears, so does a trademark superscript. Visually annoying. Sun has to protect its trademark. But there is a long standing convention about these things. You write the trademark only in the first occurrence in the text.