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SOAP: Cross Platform Web Services Development Using XML
by Scott Seely and Kent Sharkey - Pearson Education

Price at Amazon.com: $39.99

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  • Average Customer Review: Based on 17 reviews.
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: 1103672


Product Description

SOAP will be the universal "application glue" for tomorrow's widely distributed systems. It's simple, based on widely deployed standards such as XML and HTTP, and will enable virtually any business software to communicate across the Internet. SOAP: Cross Platform Internet Development Using XML offers a practical, hands-on introduction to SOAP that demonstrates how to leverage this technology on multiple platforms, using virtually every leading programming language. Seely begins by reviewing the history of distributed computing, and demonstrating how SOAP solves distributed computing problems that DCOM and CORBA failed to solve. He presents basic introductions to XML, and then to SOAP's syntax -- including SOAP's use of HTTP headers, the SOAP payload, error handling, data types, encoding structures, and more. You'll walk through building a simple SOAP server for Windows; then discover how SOAP can be extended to support multiple platforms and programming languages. SOAP: Cross Platform Internet Development Using XML contains detailed chapters on utilizing SOAP with each of five leading programming languages: C++, Perl, Python, Visual Basic, and Java. The book concludes by reviewing today's leading SOAP servers. For all developers and system integrators constructing Internet applications, applications written in multiple programming languages, or applications that integrate diverse enterprise systems; and for any IT professional evaluating SOAP.


Featured Customer Reviews

Poorly organized, May 14, 2003
I felt this book was poorly organized, and lacking in the type of information I wanted.

Chapter 1 is a history of the computer, starting with the abacus. (I'm not kidding.) Chapter 2 is an overview of XML, which might have been useful except that this book is clearly not aimed at people unfamiliar with XML. Chapter 3 is a rehash of the SOAP specification. While potentially interesting, this chapter (like the specification itself) is a blow-by-blow discussion of very minute details of the SOAP syntax. This chapter would have been better as an appendix. Better yet, just provide a hyperlink to the SOAP specification for those who are interested.

The remainder of the book is made up of two example applications and some "oh by the way" disccusions of issues more or less related to SOAP itself. Chapter 4 discusses a "simple" SOAP application in great detail. This was the chapter I found most nearly useful. Chapters 5 and 6 cover WSDL and UDDI, not SOAP. Chapter 7 talks about vendor-specific implementations of SOAP--a chapter that is already totally outdated. Chapter 8 through the end discusses a single large application built using soap. For me, Chapter 4 was the only one that came close to providing real value.

In summary, this is yet another "talk about anything to fill up the pages" book. If you remove 100+ pages of raw source code, 5 chapters that give general introductions to the history of the computer, XML, WSDL, and UDDI, you wind up with about 40 pages of poorly organized, scattered writings about SOAP itself. Not worth the [the money], in my opinion.

Failure to explain any basic concepts clearly, November 13, 2002
There are two extremely catagories of books.
1. Explain unclear concepts with clear logic and clear language.
2. Explain clear concepts with unclear logic and unclear languege.
This book definitely belongs to the second catagory.
How hard XML scheme syntax could be? This book can screw all of them up.
It wastes of your time if you did not already know what SOAP is.

Top to Bottom coverage, October 17, 2002
I've read about SOAP and Web Services from other books and have always come out with questions about how certain ideas work "under the hood". I feel that I really understand a concept if I know how it works at the wire level. The problem with many of the books out there is that they give you a very good coverage of the technology but not much insight into the fundamentals. Scott Seely's book on the other hand gives you a very balanced view of SOAP. It discusses XML schemas and the SOAP messaging protocol. Immediately, Scott jumps into implementing a SOAP server by hand which is essential to understanding how SOAP really works (and to learn to appreciate the need for SOAP frameworks that are currently available on various systems). The book is worth just for this chapter, if nothing else. The case study of an auction system puts a nice finishing touch, rounding off a comprehensive top to bottom treatment of SOAP.

Sorry but ..., July 06, 2002
Sorry to say, but I felt this book was no more than a first draft . At the end of it, I had no clear idea on how to write a SOAP message without refering to many other books or the spec itself. Sure the book gave me a basic overview of SOAP, but not one that I could take away and use, and gave me an overall impression that SOAP is complicated and messy. This was a rushed effort, and a waste of time. If this is one of the best books available on SOAP, then it doesn't say much for the technical authors currently working on it.

I am sorry for the author, he should spend more time on this, May 09, 2002
It's understandable that the author donot have much time in
writing this book. But I think both the publisher and the
author should be serious on writing a book.

Overall, it's not professional!


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