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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Poorly organized:
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... more info
Failure to explain any basic concepts clearly:
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:
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.... more info
Sorry but ...:
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... more info
