Understanding Enterprise SOA

Understanding Enterprise SOA gives technologists and business people an invaluable and until now missing integrated picture of the issues and their interdependencies. You will learn how to think in a big way, moving confidently between technology- and business-level concerns. Written in a comfortable, mentoring style by two industry insiders, the book draws conclusions from actual experiences of real companies in diverse industries, from manufacturing to genome research. It cuts through vendor hype and shows you what it really takes to get SOA to work.

Intended for both business people and technologists, the book reviews core SOA technologies and uncovers the critical human factors involved in deploying them. You will see how enterprise SOA changes the terrain of EAI, B2B commerce, business process management, "real time" operations, and enterprise software development in general.

What's inside:

• How SOA streamlines portal development and EAI
• Rapid integration with partners
• Effective BPM and real time management
• How to design, develop, run, and secure an SOA
• Real-World SOA deployment scenarios

• Part 1: Understanding the technology of enterprise SOA
1. The goal of loose coupling
1. In the beginning there was distributed computing
• What is distributed computing?
2. The two problems of interoperability
• Proprietary standards
• Tight coupling
3. The goal: simple and inexpensive interoperability
• The impact of object-oriented software
• Client-server
• Setting the standards
• Early loose coupling
4. Real loose coupling
• Hardware, software, and network transparency
• XML
• The coalescing of key enabling factors
5. Summary
2. Web services overview
1. When you look up my auto policy
• Call and response
• How the CSR would consume web services
2. The technology it's based on
• SOAP
• WSDL
• UDDI
3. Characteristics of web services
• Loose coupling
• Network transparency
4. Birthing a web service
• Exposing web services
• New web services
• Specific technologies
5. The savvy manager cautions:  standards
6. Summary
3. What web services can do
1. Technology with potential
2. Invoking remote procedures
3. Exchanging data
4. Impact on EDI
5. Communicating between multivendotr systems
6. Interacting interdepartmentally and beyond
7. Integrating applications (EAI)
8. The savvy manager cautions: the limits of web services
• Replacing legacy systems
• Operating securely or reliably on their own
• Performance
• It's not always SOAP, either
9. Summary
4. What is SOA?
1. Enterprise architecture: the big picture
2. The service-oriented architecture
• Struggling to adapt in today's enterprise architecture
• SOA solutions: theory and practice
3. The savvy manager cautions: EA is a process, not a dogma
4. Summary
5. SOA for enterprise application integration
1. Is Titan happy with its EAI?
• First, the truth: EAI is broken
• Islands of integration
• Other EAI challenges
2. How web services can simplify EAI
3. Web services in portals
4. Web services in software development
5. The savvy manager cautions: limitiations of web services in EAI
• Speed and reliability
• Security
• Political issues raised by web services EAI
6. Summary
6. SOA for B2B commerce
1. Does Titan do B2B?
2. Example: managing the supply chain
3. Example: building hubs
4. Partner-to-partner: airline and car rental
5. Government and scientific SOA
• Example: coordinating government
• Example: integrating scientific data
6. The savvy manager cautions: you may still need proprietary standards
7. Summary
7. SOA: improved business processes
1. The "integration-centric" enterprise
• Data warehousing
• Business activity monitoring (BAM)
• Issues in integration-centric enterprises
2. The "process-centric" enterprise
3. The savvy manager cautions: process management is subjective
4. Summary
8. Real-time operations
1. What is your company's time frame?
2. The goal of the real-time enterprise
3. Delivering real time with the SOA
4. Getting agile with a real-time SOA
5. The real-time virtual data warehouse
6. Setting business-level agreements
7. The savvy manager cautions: real time is an overused term
8. Summary
9. Security in a loosely coupled environment
1. Risks of loose coupling
• Machine to machine
• Authorization and authentication
• Privacy and integrity
• Flooding
• Auditing
2. Layers of SOA security
3. Solutions to SOA security
• SOAP message monitoring
• SAML and federated authentication
• Application proxy
• Contract management
• Certificates, keys, and encryption
• XML encryption
• Digital signatures
• Replay attack protection and auditing
4. The savvy manager cautions: don't let security paralyze you
5. Summary
10. Running an SOA
1. Problems in the unmanaged SOA
• Quality of service
• Transmission monitoring and web service orchestration
• Context sensitivity
• Change management and version control
• Load balancing and failover
2. Web service management solutions
• SOAP monitoring
• Quality of service and SLAs
• Contracts
• Caching
• Orchestration
• Context and priority
• Change management
• High availability
3. The savvy manager cautions: choosing an SOA management solution
4. Summary
11. Assembling SOA networks
1. Titan's potential SOA network
2. Managing the SOA network
• Passing messages through the network
• Managing change in the SOA network
3. Securing the SOA network
4. Finding the right solution
5. Using SOAP interception for SOA network management
6. XML VPNs
7. The savvy manager cautions: who's in charge?
8. Summary
12. Utility computing
1. What Titan would gain from utility computing
2. How open standards enable utility computing
3. Utility computing in the SOA
4. The savvy manager cautions: secure your utility computing
• Part 2: Understanding the people and process of enterprise SOA
13. Exploring an SOA for Tital
1. Meeting with Titan's people
2. Converting Titan's wish list into an SOA
• Matching the wish list to services and processes
• Translating the wish list into a service map
3. Summary
14. Achieving consensus at Titan
1. The second meeting
• Replacing the front-end
• Transitioning to best of breed
2. Leadership
3. The four P's
4. Summary
15. People: starting the training
1. Grouping for SOA training success
2. Going beyond the basics
3. Adding an "architects' council"
4. Summary
16. People: establishing best practices
1. Service discovery
• Modeling the business
• Process definition
2. Service creation, part I
• Rating the services
• Migration
• Isolation
• Flexibility and reusability
• Other factors
• Overall evaluation
• Next steps
3. Summary
17. People: establishing best practices
1. Selecting a platform
2. Choosing a pilot project
3. Confronting a real architecture
4. Setting goals and achieving success
5. Measuring success
6. Summary
18. Plan and proceed
1. Forming an SOA plan
• Heavy lifting
• Making big decisions
• Forming the target architecture
• Migration plan
• Finalizing the plan
2. The fourth P: proceed
3. Facing Distaster
4. Summary

This book is written for idiots by idiots. The pampering tone and the simplistic examples, that are neither valid nor enlightening, makes me wanna puke… (they ain't even logically valid from time to time).

According to the authors, SOA solves everything (if we just disregard complexity and security). Oh, and yes: EAI is bad for you (and wildly different from a SOAP/WSDL…). Sigh.

Even I can produce better trash than this. As a technocrat, it gives me nothing. As a manager, it is full of techno-babble, with examples that doesn't fit business reality and so simplistic solutions, that if a CIO proposed them to management, he would get thrown out.

And it is painfully boring written, as well as being extremely verbose. Nearest trashbin is too kind a fate for this piece of trash. I can only regret the poor customers that have been paying the authors, as they probably have been cheated out of a lot of money.