Hi Folks, Another book review of a computing book which mentions Apache XML software. As usual feel free to email me if you think this is innappropriate for this mailing list. PLug for my website down the bottom so you don't have to see it if you don't want to.
Professional XML Web Services Publisher: Wrox Press Author: Too Many TO Mention ISBN: 1-861005-09-1 Price: 47.99 UKP Price: 59.99 USD Publisher Website: http://www.wrox.com As the introduction says this is a book for developers who want to know more about the current set of tools out there for providing "XML web services".Sadly it misses out a vital stage - one of how to decide when this is the right technology to use. Oh well. I *think* that I know that - but only from experience. There are many other techniques that you can look at instead including Corba, or email, or plain old http requests.However if you have decided that SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and .Net sound cool and that you have to learn more about them then you could pick up this book. It is fairly extensive in these regions and at fifty quid it better be. With twelve authors on the front it had better cover a lot of ground. And it does. But there in lies its problem. It isn't trying to convey the fact that you should, as a developer, know all of these topics in detail. It is much more trying to look at a number of competing technologies and implementations. All the authors have contributed one or two chapters, but one wonders why couldn't they have gotten one or two of them to write the whole thing? I suppose the answer yet again is being the first to market, but, I don't know whether that is the right thing. Chapter Three looks at SOAP, and your immediate reaction is "Is that it?" "The big fuss is about this?" (It explicitly does not look at SOAP V1.2 which was not finalised at publication). Anyone who has considered using XML as a transport mechanism for CORBA or similar networking systems will have considered most of this before. However of course it is far easier (and more productive) to re-use an existing protocol rather than developing your own. Anyone who has programmed CORBA in a diverse environment will have thought about ways to disassociate the client and server so that they don't have to worry about things like "version of Orbix" or whether the client is using Iona's or Sun's Corba code. However this chapter is still very theoretical. There isn't any discussion of the relative merits of different SOAP tools yet. WSDL is looked at in Chapter 4, but still lacks something. What it lacks for me is a problem to solve. I guess this is a chicken and egg situation. You don't need a Web Services Definition Language until you have some web services to define. Likewise if you have a web service, how do you tell the possible clients its interface details. I'm sure that Corba attempted something similar, but I don't remember it being popular. This WSDL chapter makes it all look a lot easier. Every page has several XML snippets which make the whole thing easy to grasp even if you are doing little more than skimming over the book. For some reason we are introduced to some SOAP toolkits now: Microsoft's & IBM's because they have adopted WSDL. The SOAP Bindings chapter is mostly about transport mechanisms. The one which interests me most of all is Apache SOAP and Tomcat (since Apache is the route I most often travel). But it also looks at FTP and SMTP as alternatives... Now here comes (IMHO) the Biggy. The first chapter on UDDI. I wont comment much on this chapter except to repeat most of the criticisms made above. I'll let another reviewer with more experience of UDDI look into this. I wanted more of "This is the sort of problem which UDDI solves". This is the first chapter I spotted which requires a detailed API explanation. It briefly mentions ebXML (which attempts to solve similar problems in a slightly different way), and JAXR which attempts to wrap things like UDDI in a consistent way. I was a bit miffed to find that almost all the examples used American methods of classification and seemed to assume that all readers were familiar with them. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 look at different UDDI and SOAP implementations with particular emphasis on the Microsoft SOAP toolkit. I skipped that bit. I don't want to develop on a Windows platform again. Life is too short. But of course you might want to. Likewise this chapter looked at C++ SOAP implementations as well as Java and other languages. In real development you will probably stick to one of these and so not need the other details. Chapter 10 is the one to read in detail. This is the big example application starting off from first requirements (written in a very tongue in cheek style) to an implementation in java using Tomcat, IBM's WSTK, UDDI and so on. Chapter 11 looks at .Net Web services. As mentioned earlier I don't intend to do any more Windows software development so I can't really comment on this chapter further. However were I forced into doing it I think this chapter looks detailed enough to satisfy me. Chapter 12 is the odd child of the lot. A whole chapter on "Developing Web Services with Python"? No Comment. Chapter 13 looks at Security and I am not at all convinced that it communicated the strategy which needs to be used here. Perhaps someone else could look at the chapter and comment on it. Two Detailed Case studies follow, and a printout of the W3X Notes for SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, and something official looking about UDDI data types. It is amusing to note that the last WSDL chapter has WDSL written in the header of every page. I've spotted a few major typos like that and it worries me a bit. I think perhaps a link to the errata might be worthwhile. Published on http://news.DiverseBooks.com/ RDF/RSS files available. ===== Alex McLintock [EMAIL PROTECTED] Open Source Consultancy in London OpenWeb Analysts Ltd, http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ --- SF and Computing Book News and Reviews: http://news.diversebooks.com/ Get Your XML T-Shirt <t-shirt/> at http://www.inversity.co.uk/ COMPETITION : http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=01/10/08/1947255 ________________________________________________________________ Nokia 5510 looks weird sounds great. Go to http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/nokia/ discover and win it! The competition ends 16 th of December 2001. --------------------------------------------------------------------- In case of troubles, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
