Professional Open Source Web Services

ISBN 1-861007-46-9 Price £36.99 UK
Dietrich Ayala, Christopher Browne, Vivek Chopra, Dr. Poornachandra Sarang, Kapil Apshankar, Tim McAllister
             11 Chapters, 8 Appendices and Index in 523 pages

Chapter List


        1    Web Services - an introduction
        2    Web Services Architecture
        3    Exploring SOAP, WSDL and UDDI
        4    Java Web Services from Apache
        5    Web Services Security
        6    Perl and SOAP::Lite
        7    Python and Web Services
        8    PHP and Web Services
        9    Web Services with C++
        10  Other SOAP implementations
        11  Case Study - Designing web services from legacy modules
 

        Configuring Tomcat with Apache
             Java2WSDL options Synopsis

If you are someone who has used and understood some programming languages and you want to understand some introductory concepts about Open Source methods then this book is probably for you.   If you were to use it along with the various internet search engines such as Google for example you would be able to find some useful information for further studies.  The layout is easy to understand as are all Wrox books.  There is a convention in all Wrox books where any code is highlighted in a greyed out box so that the reader doesn't have to tear his or her hair out trying to find the relevant part of the text.  The example that you can see below is from page 39 of the book.





MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: Multipart/related; boundary=MIME_boundary; type=text/html;
        start="<myimagedoc.xml@mysite.com>"
Content-Description: This is the optional message description.

--MIME_boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-ID: <myimagedoc.xml@mysite.com>

<?xml version='1.0' ?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<SOAP-ENV:Body>
. .
<theSignedForm href="cid:myimage.tiff@mysite.com"/>
. .
</SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

--MIME_boundary
Content-Type: image/tiff
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-ID: <myimage.tiff@mysite.com>

. . . binary TIFF image . . .
--MIME_boundary--
SOAP Messages with Attachments (SwA)


Review

Some programming and computing science books are better than others.   This one is probably quite good in that it sets out to explain some facts about Open Source web services.  It's comprehensive in it's nature and tone.  Some more pages might have been helpful. This is a first edition and so it's highly likely that the authors have saved themselves up for a second edition some time next year.   We still need more books about Free or Open Source software.  There are still people out there who need to be educated or to find some useful info.  Professional Open Source Web Services is aimed at programmers who have a knowledge of programming TCP/IP, HTTP, XML and a concept of client-server applications .

The first part of the book introduces distributed computing and the drawbacks contained therein.  A case is put forward for Open Source web services. Following on from this the architecture of web services is shown and building blocks such as XML and SOAP and  others are explained to the advantage of the reader.   Moving on from here the three web technologies are discussed which are Simple Object Access Protocol, Web Service Description Language and Universal Description Discovery and Integration.   Chapter four goes on to discuss the use of popular open source applications like Apache.  The concept of computer security is looked into at chapter five.   SOAP::Lite is discussed in some depth at chapter six.  At chapter seven we find that one of the authors is a Python fan.  Good job that no one reading this review does anything with Perl.  Chapter  eight is where that well known internet stalwart PHP is discussed.  Our own Phorum bulletin board is written with this.  If you haven't seen PHP in action you should have a look at Phorum.  The later parts of the book discuss what C++ developers might want to do with web services and also SOAP for Ruby and kSOAP which enables web services for Java applets.  The various appendices at the end of the book provide the kind of invaluable information that you can only find in Wrox Press publications.

To sum up.   What does this book explain?
 If you haven't been exposed to this kind of software and the mind set that is involved with it you might do well to get hold of this publication and read it from cover to cover.


Review by Richard Ibbotson.