SOAModeling.org was listed as one of ten SOA resources in the book "Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies" so of course I had to pick up a copy and see what it was about. The book does provide a good summary of SOA and I wouldn't have a problem recommending this book to someone wanting a general overview of SOA. Part V, "Real Life with SOA" provided products for several vendors which saved me a lot of time when I recently added some vendor products to the SOAModeling.org product catalog.

The only section of the book I would have preferred to see a different explanation was the section on registry/repositories. In the book, SOA repositories are associated with the source code of the applications. A better association of the SOA repository would be public shared state of a service. Chapter 13 discusses data in service oriented computing systems. This would have been a good place to associate data semantics, information, and metadata with additional capabilities of the SOA registry and publicly shared data with the SOA repository. Information can be retrieved from a service by calling the service interface directly or the service may store its publicly available data in a registry/repository for other participants to understand and retrieve. Multiple consumers can then use the registry/repository for information semantics, specialized views of the information, data retrieval, event notifications on data updates, etc. This offloads the work of the service providing public data on a per request bases to a mediated data provider. The mediated data provider also handles the bigger picture of the SOA environment/ecosystem. It is true that the SOA repository could contain the system or record for source code, it is just not generally thought of this way among many people in the industry.

There was a page in the book on "The Industrialization of Software" which was a nice elaboration of a section of the home page content on SOAModeling.org. This theme got its start from helping my nine-year-old daughter study for a history test. Reluctant to study her history, she was wondering how the industrial revolution would make any difference to her future. I explained to her that Daddy is involved in a computing industrial revolution. The analogy between the 19th century Industrial Revolution and a SOA computing revolution went so well together that I added it to the home page of SOAModeling.org. When I noticed this page in Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies, I pointed it out to my daughter and said, "See what studying for your history test has started." I still have my work cut out to turn her on to studying for history though.

Danny Thornton