Understanding SOA with Web Services

The single largest cost of information technology (IT) systems integration islabor. To reduce cost and improve efficiency, it's necessary to reducecomplexity, which is the main motivation for the use of Service OrientedArchitecture with Web services. Why SOAs and Web services? Consensusaround the software industry is that customers are seeking cost-effective fixesfor their integration issues en masse. SOAs and Web services facilitate that.This book describes the best approach to designing and developing a SOAbased integration solution using Web services technologies, and describes howa SOA provides a foundation for addressing other IT requirements, such asmulti-channel client access, application interoperability through one servicecalling another service, and business process management through servicecomposition into flows.

About the Authors

In the role of Chief Technology Officer at IONA, Eric Newcomer is responsible for IONA's technology roadmap and direction as relates to standards adoption, architecture, and product design. Eric joined IONA in November 1999 as transaction architect, and most recently served as Vice President of Engineering, Web Services Integration Products. Eric has 26 years experience in the computer industry, including more than 15 years at Digital Equipment Corporation/Compaq Computer, where he held a variety of technical and management positions before receiving a corporate-level technical appointment. Eric received his BA in American Studies from Antioch College, with a minor in computer science.

In addition to Understanding Web Services, published in 2002, Eric is co-author of Principles of Transaction Processing, published in 1997 by Morgan Kaufman, and co-author of a chapter called "The Keys to the Highway" in The Future of Software, published in 1995 by MIT Press. Eric is also the author of numerous white papers and articles, co-author and editor of the Structured Transaction Definition Language specification published by X/Open (now The Open Group) in 1994, former member of the Transaction Internet Protocol working group at IETF, former member of the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing committee that created the XA specification, former chair of the OTS RTF at OMG, and chair of the team that developed the XML Valuetype specification at OMG to map XML to CORBA. He was a charter member of the XML Protocols Working Group at W3C, where he served as an editor of the requirements document that led to SOAP 1.2. He served for nearly two years as an editor of the W3C Web Services Architecture Specification, and most recently served as co-chair and editor of the Web Services Composite Application Framework set of specifications at OASIS.

Greg Lomow, Ph.D., is a senior manager and consultant for BearingPoint, Inc. Greg has 12 years of experience as a consultant and enterprise architect working in the financial services, telecom, and federal government sectors designing business applications using service-oriented architecture, developing simulation applications using distributed object technology, and training developers in object-oriented design and programming techniques. He also worked for eight years as a product manager at Jade Simulations, Level 8 Systems, and IONA Technologies responsible for integration, web services, and middleware products. Greg co-authored C++ Frequently Asked Questions published by Addison-Wesley in October 1999 (1st ed.) and again in January 1999 (2nd ed.). He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Calgary, Canada, in 1988. Greg is an active member of the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization.

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