“The concept of service oriented architecture has long promised visions of agile organizations being able to swap out interfaces and applications as business needs change. SOA also promises incredible developer and IT productivity, with the idea that key services would be candidates for cross-enterprise sharing or reuse. But many organizations’ efforts to move to SOA have been mired–by organizational issues, by conflicting vendor messages, and by architectures that may amount to little more than Just a Bunch of Web Services. There’s been a lot of confusion in the SOA marketplace about exactly what SOA is, what it’s supposed to accomplish, and how an enterprise goes about in making it work.



SOA Design Patterns is a definitive work that offers clarity on the purpose and functioning of service oriented architecture. SOA Design Patterns not only helps the IT practitioner lay the groundwork for a well-functioning SOA effort across the enterprise, but also connects the dots between SOA and the business requirements in a very concrete way. Plus, this book is completely technology agnostic—SOA Design Patterns rightly focuses on infrastructure and architecture, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using components of one kind or another, or Java, or .NET, or Web services, or REST-style interfaces.



While no two SOA implementations are alike, Thomas Erl and his team of contributors have effectively identified the similarities in composition services need to have at a sub-atomic level in order to interact with each other as we hope they will. The book identifies 85 SOA design patterns which have been developed and thoroughly vetted to ensure that a service-oriented architecture does achieve the flexibility and loose coupling promised. The book is also compelling in that it is a living document, if you will, inviting participation in an open process to identify and formulate new patterns to this growing body of knowledge.”

- Joe McKendrick, Independent Analyst, Author of ZDNet’s SOA Blog