Each year Open World is greeted by the release of a number of key technology books, often seen as a target for authors and publishers of Oracle texts. It is a great chance to browse through the latest releases and meet up with authors at various panel and launch events. With SOA, this year is no exception. There are a variety of books on the subject being released either just before OOW or at the conference. I have picked out a selection here that any current or aspiring Oracle SOA Deveoper or Architect should look out for.
Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's GuideAntony Reynolds, Matt Wright
I was delighted when this book was updated for SOA Suite 11g, our team at Griffiths Waite used the original book extensively as it adds real examples to the theory that you get through training and tutorials. It also gives valueable advice on how to structure services and which tools to use for which purpose. It is hard enough authoring such a book when you are based in the same office, so since the relocation of Antony and Matt to the US and Australia respectively it is a great credit to get the update released.
Lucas Jellema
I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book, it promises to be a key "go to" source in our reference library. I have seen a lot of contributions from other ACE Directors, experts in particular tools and most importantly much time spent by Lucas in getting each and every scenario from the book working in his case study environment. As well as writing the book, Lucas has also delivered an enterprise scope project for the fictional hospital that forms the underlying case study. This book promises to be practical, complete and more than the sum of all the parts.
Guido Schmutz, Daniel Liebhart, Peter Welkenbach
A comprehensive walk through the differing types of architectures that you will experience, from data integration to service orchestration and event architecture. The book first introduces the various principles and models in integration. If you are looking for terminology, protocols and patterns to be explained, this book does a good job. An integration blueprint / reference architecture is presented, splitting the architecture into layers. This model maps closely to others I have used, but I would say it is a little more vendor agnostic than most that go to this level of detail, which is useful for those who have not selected middleware tools yet. One very useful section is presented at the end showing how products (covering Oracle FMW, IBM Websphere, MS Biztalk/.Net and Spring/Open Source) map onto this arhcitectural blueprint. This was very interesting for me with, as to date most of my implementations have been purely Oracle based.
Oracle Fusion Middleware PatternsHarish Gaur, Markus Zirn and Contributors
Harish and Markus have done a fine job over the last couple of years in bring together a series of articles that showcase the use of muliple Fusion Middleware tools together. It includes some very innovative use cases. Often I get asked about perceived overlaps between Oracle products and get asked to recommend which tools to use for which pupose and which scenarios to combine the tools - this book will be a good starting point to show examples wo back up these discussions. One of the chapters is an article I contributed last year with a colleague and shows the potential of combining SOA with BAM and BI. The project in question is not at this level of innovation yet, but has a solid SOA and BAM base to build on top of and start to realise some of the innovative benefits shown in the article.
Lots of reading over the next couple of weeks then, it will be a busy time.
