Enterprise Application Integration Using .NET

Rating:
Summary: Great first two chapters, horrid application advice.
Review: His descriptions of how to build Web services essentially explained that it was a best practice to force clients and servers to hand code and parse the XML. He recommends baking backend logic into the Web service-example: if processing involves 3 systems, the "integration" includes messages in the up front message with instructions for all three systems to process and correctly dispatch. This means that the client using the integrated system has to know the topology/linkages between the integrated systems. This is fine if you like white box integration but hard to code against/debug/test/transparently extend. A better approach would be to make the integrated Web service have one message that takes enough information for the integrated systems to do their job. The abstraction would be cleaner and involve much less work for anyone writing code to the Web service. Furthermore, this abstraction would allow for me to integrate more systems later on without forcing the consumer of the code to be updated to take advantage of my improvements.

I know this book was recently recommended by the MSDN newsletter. Regardless, stay away from this book and put your money elsewhere.

The other issue is that Butch spends very little time explaining the process of application integration. He goes through the first two chapters with anecdotes and advice that is quite good, then proceeds to dump out code for a poorly designed integration project he created. The "I'm a little contract" example is great, but he fails to actually show how this would be used to create his integration application.


Rating:
Summary: An introduction to Web Services
Review: While this book is directed at the programmer, it is not entirely dependent on the .NET platform, despite its title. The first 4 chapters concern the design process; independent of any implementation. These chapters are a good description of the various top-down phases that any programmer can use.

The rest of the book deals with coding. But it leads off with a chapter on Web Services. Which talks about how its use can aid a distributed implementation of the solution. You get a brief exposure to the amazing verbosity of Web Services Description Language.

Perhaps this chapter may have the most appeal to some readers. It really distinguishes the book from others that discuss using .NET as a development area. If you are wondering how to jump into Web Services, try here. The discussion is concise enough to have merit, if you are unsure about committing enough time to a full Web Services approach. Later chapters continue this study in more detail.