SOA - A Planning and Implementation Guide For Business and Technology

I recently finished reading Service-Oriented Architecture - A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology, written by Eric A. Marks and Michael Bell.

I liked it because it frames SOA with more of a business perspective and how to approach SOA in general. We all know that SOA does not necessarily equal WS-*. Where often SOA books are throwing spec after spec at us.

This book provides advice on how to create an SOA model to enhance the 2 main goals of an SOA:

1. Improved Code Reuse

2. Quicker Time to Market for Software Projects

Chapter 3 - SOA Business Modelling provided an example of SOA Value Analysis with a matrix comparing the various areas of the Business Value Chain against SOA Value Drivers such as "Grow the Business","Reduce Costs", "Asset Reuse", "Business Agility","IT Flexibility","Time to Market","Business Processes","Process Visibility". This analysis can help identify "SOA hot spots" to help prioritize business processes.

I appreciated the "big picture" approach to the book. Where you started off considering things like SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and SOA Governance, without wondering how to patch different specs together. The diagrams were good, it looked like some custom notation however. A good bridging book between technology and business.

A pretty good book, glad I read it. The title makes alot of sense after reading the whole book :

SOA - A Planning And Implementation Guide For Business And Technology

JavaServer Faces!

I have been interested in an open source platform to launch a web site. I had heard the about jsf as a J2EE framework.

One is the lifecycle model better designed to protect the "model" of the MVC architecture.



The current available version is 1.2 which is available from Sun's Glassfish project. I was hoping the the Apache myfaces project would have a version 1.2 out but it seems they are still testing it.

Sun's version does not run on Tomcat, so I hope the MyFaces team can get 1.2 out soon. I have seen some indications that this can be checked out from cvs but not currently available as a release product.

My current set up is Tomcat,Eclipse,MyFaces,MySql along with the Sysdeo debugger.
Security for the app is set up using a Filter.
Basic templating done via Tiles.

I have some basic functionality up and running but I wanted to learn more about the JSF details before so I got a copy of "Core JavaServer Faces" by Geary,Horstmann. It was very good at filling in some gaps and revealing some other ideas I would like to incorporate in my J2EE apps.

It was good in describing the validation process, the JSF lifecycle(as diagrammed above), event handling, some of the Ajax code(Ajax4jsf).

When I get some more time I will revisit my application and incorporate some of this.

JSF is pretty neat!


Some good links:
http://myfaces.apache.org/
http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaServer_Faces
http://www.coreservlets.com/JSF-Tutorial/