Product Description

Build Web services with enterprise-class reliability, performance, and value. Web services are transforming IT, and represent a powerful new way to reduce cost and drive top-line growth throughout the enterprise. This book takes a no-nonsense view of architecting and constructing enterprise-class Web services and applications. The authors expertly assess the current state of the Web services platform, offering best practices and new architectural patterns for leveraging the advantages of Web services-and mitigating the risks. This work helps build Web services and applications that meet enterprise requirements for security, mobility, transactions, QoS, workflow, portlets, management, and more. It helps you avoid the "bottomless pit" of application rewriting and maintenance overhead, and architect applications to stay reliable even if some Web services go off-line. It features acale applications to support the inclusion of Web services from multiple partners, and secure private information within Web services environments. It helps you develop high-value mobile Web service applications, and includes a detailed case study. Whether you're an architect, developer, project leader, or manager, this book will help you deliver on the promise of Web services in your real-world enterprise environment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1402136 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.27" h x 7.04" w x 9.28" l, 2.12 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

From the Back Cover

Build Web services with enterprise-class reliability, performance, and value

Web services are transforming IT, and represent a powerful new way to reduce cost and drive top-line growth throughout the enterprise. This book takes a no-nonsense view of architecting and constructing enterprise-class Web services and applications. The authors expertly assess the current state of the Web services platform, offering best practices and new architectural patterns for leveraging the advantages of Web services--and mitigating the risks.

• Build Web services and applications that meet enterprise requirements for security, mobility, transactions, QoS, workflow, portlets, management, and more
• Avoid the "bottomless pit" of application rewriting and maintenance overhead
• Architect applications to stay reliable even if some Web services go off-line
• Scale applications to support the inclusion of Web services from multiple partners
• Secure private information within Web services environments
• Develop high-value mobile Web service applications
• Includes a detailed case study

Whether you're an architect, developer, project leader, or manager, this book will help you deliver on the promise of Web services in your real-world enterprise environment.

About the Author

DR. SANDEEP CHATTERJEE is a seasoned technology expert and business professional with over a decade of hands-on contributions as a technologist, consultant, entrepreneur, and author. He is Chief Technology Officer of a startup focused on Web services delivery and management, and also serves as a Chief Technology Consultant for Fortune-100 and major not-for-profit organizations including Hewlett-Packard and ACCION International. Sandeep served on the Expert Group that specified the worldwide standard for mobile Web services, and was the lead of Hewlett-Packard's Web Services Mediation Platform. He was also Entrepreneur-in-Residence at FidelityCAPITAL, the VC arm of Fidelity Investments. Sandeep holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research in mobile systems was selected as one of the top 35 inventions in the 35-year history of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

DR. JAMES WEBBER is an architect and Web Services fanatic at Arjuna Technologies where he works on Web services transaction and Grid computing technology. Prior to joining Arjuna Technologies, he was the lead developer with Hewlett-Packard working on their BTP-based Web Services Transactions product--the industry's first Web Services Transaction solution. An active speaker and Web Services proponent, Jim is a co-author of the WS-CAF suite of specifications. Jim holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science and Ph.D. in Parallel Computing both from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Web services technologies are fundamentally changing the software industry, making the role of enterprise IT organizations more strategic, and recasting the software vendor-consumer relationship. Web services are also being hailed by CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs as the next-generation vehicle for driving topline growth and controlling bottom lines. But, simply jumping on the Web services bandwagon won't lead to corporate success. Web services are simply a platform; how companies implement a solution using this new technology will determine their success, and ultimately their return on investment (ROI). In this book, we take a no-nonsense, strategic view of developing enterprise Web services and applications: looking at where the technologies are, where they are going, and how companies need to architect their own Web services solutions so as not to get left behind.

Web services platforms provide the functionality to build and interact with distributed applications by sending eXtensible Markup Language (XML) messages. Additional technology layers are constantly emerging, others are being refined, and still others are being discarded. The platform is essentially a moving target.

So as not to be left behind, companies are building and deploying their applications while work on the underlying platform continues. And, as with any industry standard initiatives, which require building consensus, the Web services platform will remain a work in progress for some time.

How can you build any meaningful application, let alone mission-critical enterprise applications, on such a platform? If you are a developer or an architect charged with building Web services or applications that consume Web services, you have to know where the platform is today, and where it is going. Otherwise, the endless pit of application rewrite and maintenance overhead will far outweigh any benefits that can be garnered from this promising new technology.

Real world, enterprise Web services and applications cannot be developed by simply reading through the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) specifications. Developers must understand a number of different standards and technologies, and more importantly, their inter-relationships as well as best practices for their use.

Consider an e-business application that requires interaction between multiple partner Web services. Understanding SOAP and WSDL gives developers the ability to write Web services and consume them within their application. But, how must the application be architected to be reliable in case some Web services become unavailable? How can an application be written to seamlessly scale to support new Web services from a growing list of strategic partner companies? What are the best practices for developing mobile Web service applications, and how can individual Web services be created to support quality-of-service (QoS)? How can transactional guarantees or atomic coordination between multiple, independent Web services be supported by applications? And, how can all of this be done securely so that corporate and individual information and intellectual property are safeguarded?

In this book, we focus on how to develop Web services and applications within real world enterprise environments. We describe not only the vanilla Web services platform consisting of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), but also build upon this to include the other technologies, standards, and emerging standards that provide support for transactions, security and authentication, mobile and wireless, quality-of-service, conversations, workflow, interactive applications and portals, as well as systems management.

We discuss the opportunities represented by Web services and, more importantly, describe best practices and architectural patterns for building enterprise systems that position you and your organization to most fully leverage those opportunities. We do not summarize any one Web services standard, but instead provide a sufficiently thorough discussion of all of the critical technologies and standards, as well as their inter-relationships, that are necessary for building enterprise Web services and applications. Our focus is on developing enterprise Web services and applications based on industry standard Web services technologies, not on summarizing standards.