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Service-oriented architecture : analysis and design for services and microservices (2nd ed.)
Erl T., Prentice Hall Press, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2016. 416 pp. Type: Book (978-0-133858-58-7)
Date Reviewed: Nov 21 2017

The study of software architecture has evolved immensely over the years, attracting the attention of architects, designers, and developers handling projects. Software architecture and its underlying philosophy suggest longer life cycles of software, reuse of the software services, growth, and dynamic alignment between business processes and the software used, among other issues. Software architecture generally defines broad contours of mapped behavior of any problem or artifact by identifying components dealing with specific deliverables, while suggesting the ways of interconnecting identified components to meet the overall objectives stated, leaving the designers and implementers to deploy the services. This flexibility provided scope for standardization. Organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Object Management Group (OMG), and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) felt this need for standardization, and thus SOA emerged as a possible solution.

SOA evolved as a powerful approach to combine the best practices of functional enterprise architecture with design frameworks and implementations through languages like unified modeling language (UML) and object-oriented approaches. The onus of this approach rests on providing better enterprise architecture and integration of services with reuse and scalability as intrinsic benefits for an enterprise. It is thus imperative for the software architecture to allow absorption of evolving industry standards and enterprise requirements, and to extend the continued agile environment while providing services as desired and tracking the style and pattern of the components used through decomposition, modularity, cohesion, and coupling processes. This is important in the current context of the increasing use of patterns and style of architecture to garner benefits of big data, cloud computing, and machine learning environments.

The author of this second edition has rightly attempted to include the contemporary topics on architecture through the introduction of micro services and patterns while discussing an architectural style, representational state transfer (REST). This second edition attempts to retain the basic discussions on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, concepts, technology, and design as well, and moves further to deal with SOA design patterns, SOA with REST, nest generation SOA, and SOA governance. The sequential approach to describe basic fundamentals of SOA, detailing an approach to service-oriented analysis and design with REST, is a major strength of this second edition of the book. Its simplistic approach has enhanced the readability. It presents the abstractions of cases with the help of frameworks and sequence diagrams, explains the design principles with the support of flow diagrams and relationship diagrams of components, and explains the implementation of code through Extensible Markup Language (XML) and web services description language (WSDL) and with the help of well-explained schema. This approach is helpful for beginners, researchers, architects, designers, and developers to not only understand the basic concepts, but also to implement the architectural principles, adopting effective component design methods. Its appendices are of immense help for the reader to gather information comprehensively.

The book, however, leaves room for improvements. Because it is the second edition and much evolution in the SOA area has taken place, it seems logical to meet the expectation of the reader by taking up a case on an enterprise, narrating the timeline of the components used and reused, and relating the enterprise integration architecture (EIA) pursued and the way SOA could have helped or has helped. With the support of discussions on style, pattern, decomposition, modularity, cohesion, and coupling, the discussion of the case could have helped readers better internalize the information.

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Reviewer:  Harekrishna Misra Review #: CR145665 (1802-0048)
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