I actually prefer Thomas Erl's second book
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design (
amazon US) which seems much more structured.
You can find sample chapters for the first book
here You can find sample chapters for the second book
here His third book
SOA Principles of Service Design (
amazon US) is also interesting (
sample chapters).
A fourth book
SOA Design Patterns may be published sometime next year.
However these books are completely in the messaging paradigm (which is good) and all about
SOAP, WSDL, and WS-* standards. NO IMPLEMENTATION, no
Java, no .NET, etc.
If you are looking for a "simpler" style of web services then go for
RESTful Web Services (
amazon US; concepts are explained, most examples are in Ruby but there is also a
Restlet example). Currently the disadvantage for RESTful web services is that there are no wizards in the current generation of IDEs that will crank them out for you, so there is more hand-coding. However the advantage of the SOAP-based web services is usually short-lived. You'll probably have to deal with the raw complexity of the WS-* standards the first time your wizards croak or when you a trying to use (possibly multiple) WS-* standards in your web service interface.
RMH: WS* vs. REST / Intelligence vs. Wisdom REST vs. WS-*: A Parable How I Explained REST to My Wife If you are interested in implementing web services with JAX-WS (Glassfish; Java EE 5):
SOA Using Java� Web Services (
amazon US)
Am I Stupid or is Java Web Services Really Hard? If you are interested in implementing
J2EE 1.4 web services (JAX-RPC etc.):
J2EE Web Services (RMH; Richard Monson-Haefel) (
amazon US)
Originally posted by Mike Anna:
I would want to understand this entire show of web services in a pretty laymans language (in respect to ws, atleast).
I would love if some one can suggest ONE good book for learning Web services.
No can do. To talk about web services properly you need learn about the messaging paradigm that the web service client and web service server use to communicate. Once you learn that, you still have to learn about framework and APIs that you are going to use to implement the web service (and possibly clients). Because the
enterprisey SOAP/WSDL/WS-* standards got so complicated, RESTful web services started to appear (talk about them started back in 2002, SOAP dates back to
2000 and earlier). There are too many aspects to web services to cover "the entire show of web services" in one single volume - unless you are simply looking for an executive summary. So it is going to take more that one or two books to "understand the
entire show of web services" - despite the fact that vendors offer some features in the implementation language (be it .NET web service attributes or JAX-WS web service annotations) to �ease development�. Many of them try to ignore the
object-hierarchical impedance mismatch (Java Objects vs. XML message payloads) - pretending to be
web service magic pixie dust.