Wednesday, September 12, 2007

SOA Best Practices: A Book Review

"Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices" is by Dirk Krafzig, Dirk, Karl Banke and Dirk Slama. These are three Germans from the banking and insurance sector who present a wealth of practical experience to the reader. They attempt to talk about SOA without favoring any particular technology which is hard to do. I would still say that there experience with EJBs and CORBA provided a certain slant to the discussions however they were also using SOAP, WSDL and XML examples in their discussions.

The book had the feel of describing the real world rather than discussing and ideal world. By contrast the book by Erl was from a Web Services purist's point of view and glossed over some practical issues like what to do about user interfaces, performance problems and legacy transaction integrity. On the other hand Erl had the advantage of not having to describe the concepts in terms of differing technologies.

Legacy integration issues were covered well by Krafzig et al. There was an excellent chapter on process integrity and a good chapter on infrastructure issues like Scalability, Interoperability and Security. They covered the range of process integrity techniques from "Eyes Closed and Praying" to "Two Phase Commit over a heterogeneous environments" and "SAGAs with complex compensation graphs".

Krafzig et al provide more of "Horses for Courses" approach. Their approach does not necessarily advocate the same approach for fine grain and course grain services. Their approach even accepts that synchronous as well as asynchronous service buses might need to work side by side.

One theme was the importance of the registry and repository for SOA. The book gives some practical suggest about what to put in these stores. Another theme is the importance of governance of the development process. This theme is taken up in a later chapter which discusses SOA-driven project management, configuration management and testing. The book also discusses a thin-thread approach to software development. This is accompanied by discussions on how to fund SOA development and how to manage the risk of these initiatives.
The climax and conclusion of the book is four case studies. These are real-life examples with solutions that had to meet compromises and struggled with incorporating legacy environments with their solutions. It would have been nice to have an example that was not a finance company but it seems that is where the money is when it comes to SOA (and any big information systems for that matter).

The book did not provide a motivating definition of SOA although the thoughts on architecture I found enlightening. Such as "architecture … is designed to last longer than one or two of these technology innovation cycles" and that its purpose is to simplify development. How easy it is to forget that our new inventions in IT are just to make the world a simpler place.
I enjoyed this book. It was good to read a European context on SOA. They referenced Niklaus Wirth (a hero to anyone who did computer science when I did it) a couple of times and referred to other European IT Gurus which is refreshing break from the US IT heritage. I commend it to those who want a technology-agnostic look at SOA.

References
Erl, Thomas, Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design, 2005 Prentice Hall

Krafzig, Dirk, Banke, Karl and Slama, Dirk, Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices, Prentice Hall, 2004

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