Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt

This book is akin to scientific monographs like conference proceedings, where each chapter has a different author. The publisher is trying this "Compendium" format with its portfolio of existing single author texts on the many aspects of Service Oriented Architecture. The field has spent the last 10-12 years fleshing out the concepts and implementations. Which accounts in part for the length of the current book. Many, many details. The reader is cautioned that if you have previously read Packt books on SOA, you might well run into familiar sections in some chapters. But the book is meant as a relatively concise summary of how things stand in SOA, circa 2011-2. In this, it is a cheaper alternative than buying several books on each of the SOA subtopics, from this publisher or others.Major concepts covered include the Enterprise Service Bus and the role of middleware and associated routing methods. There are patterns to be learnt, and different ways to architect a system - hub and spoke, pipeline, point to point and of course SOA itself.There is a brief mention of grid computing. Very different from cloud computing. A set of machines implementing a grid might well be all at one data center. The grid is a way to do large scale parallel processing on a big data set. Including most relevant for the book, SOA problems.The jargon of XTP = Extreme Transaction Processing also gets tossed into the text. Only a cursory discussion. XTP seems little more than marketing hype at this time.Another major idea that you should understand is Web Services. For making interoperable and modular software systems, located across the Web. Using XML as the language of data interchange. From this flows a bevy of yet more ideas, embedded in jargon like SOAP (which is no longer an acronym), WSDL (Description Language), UDDI (Universal Description Discovery Integration) and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Candidly, your head might spin from the sheer mass of such notations and their associated diagrams; all of which there seems no shortage in the text.One relatively straightforward section is Chapter 4, on XML integration. Turns out that understanding XML code is easy, and ditto for the related concepts like the Document Object Model and the optimal parsing of XML documents. Later chapters get more abstruse, where XML is the lowest level conceptual leaf in the structures and interactions they describe.And yes, another reason for the book's length is the numerous XML snippets provided. These are essential to grap instantiations of often far more abstract ideas. But XML is so verbose; self-documenting is the equivalent term. In any event, the book can train you in getting used to such printed garrulity.