Eric Newcomer's Weblog

Finally copies of the book have arrived! On Amazon.com it still says that it's not yet available for shipment, but presumeably that will change soon. Addison Wesley did a great job - the book looks great, and the blue on the cover is really cool.

People ask about the significance of the zebras - basically we were given the choice of some cute animal photos, and the zebras were just the best photo.

Greg and I tried hard to create a book that clearly describes why you would want to invest in an SOA with Web services -- rapid integration, multi-channel access, and business process automation -- and what technologies are needed to achieve the goals of such investment.

The book is in David Chappell's Independent Technology Guide series, which means that it includes the authors' perspectives on topics in the book, clearly identified in analysis boxes. The ITG series is a tutorial series, but this book is definitely a follow on to Understanding Web Services. The first book describes the basic technologies (XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and this book descriibes how to apply those technologies (and other WS-* related technologies) to an SOA.

There's been a lot of controversy lately in the industry (including in this blog and other similar blogs) about the role of the WS-* specifications in IT solutions. We tried very hard to describe the major categories of specifications useful in an SOA - reliable messaging, metadata, transactions, security, and orchestration -- in a way that relates the technologies specifically to the solutions they provide.

As usual, when you're an author looking at a copy of a new book, the first thing you want to do is see whether they got all the latest corrections in ;-). They did.

Anyway, let us know what you think when you get a chance. Thanks.