Introduction

Today, I will digress from my usual tutorials and guide format. Instead, I will provide a review of the Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook published by Packt. For the impatient, get the book! You won't regret it.

What is Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook?

Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community focused on creating document-driven Web services.

Spring Web Services aims to facilitate contract-first SOAP service development, allowing for the creation of flexible web services using one of the many ways to manipulate XML payloads.

This comprehensive guide -- which provides professional expertise on a variety of technical topics right from setting-up a contract-first Web-Service, creating client of a Web-Service to serialization, monitoring, testing and security using Spring-WS -- helps you enhance your skills in Spring Web Services.

Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook includes a wide variety of recipes that covers most important topics used in real-world applications. It is a well-rounded guide covering a lot of ground in the Spring Web Services domain using systematic arranged chapters and focused recipes.

Source: Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook

The Good

The Spring Web-Services Cookbook 2 is an excellent resource for any developer who wants to incorporate Spring web service support in their projects. It covers everything from setting a simple web service provider to a highly secured, asynchronous web services leveraging various transports such as XMPP, JMS, and email (besides plain vanilla HTTP).

This book is also an outstanding reference for anyone who aspires to master the Spring web service. It discusses contract-first and contract-last development using actual samples, testing support with TCPMon and soapUI, handling and providing custom exceptions.

I'm surprised by the book's intensive coverage on marshalling. It even includes steps for MooseXML. What's even better with this book is it goes beyond simple and complex SOAP-based web services. Instead, the book also tackles topics on how to setup REST-based web services and other remoting technologies, i.e. RMI and Hessian.

The book has provided ample code samples with dependencies listed. If you're not a Maven user, you'll at least have an idea of what's needed. But to fully utilize the samples you must know Maven at least (if you're an avid Spring developer, this shouldn't be a problem)

The Bad

However, I do have some pointers that should have been included in the book (I know this is a cookbook).

I think the book should have some basic introduction regarding web services and how SOAP or REST helps us solve our problem.
The book should provide a section for newbies that demonstrates step-by-step, probably in graphical detail, on how to setup a basic web service. When reading the book, an interesting question keeps lingering on my mind: "How is a newbie supposed to understand this book without some basic experience with web services?" Maybe this is where the Spring documentation plays in?
There were a couple of glaring misspellings in the initial chapters. It's somewhat distracting and somewhat's gives me the feeling if the book was rushed. One term that keeps bothering me is the usage of "web-services" versus "web services". Somehow in the book they used both terms to denote the same thing.

The Comparison

As a guide writer, I also have written tutorials for Spring WS (web service). I admit the book has more technical detail with wider coverage. But the parts that I have written provides more step-by-step information especially for newcomers. But if you want to go beyond what I have shared on this blog, you must read this definitive cookbook.

Conclusion

Spring Web Services 2 Cookbook is a must-have cookbook for those who want to know more about Spring Web Services. You can find more information about this book by visiting the following link: http://www.packtpub.com/spring-web-services-cookbook/book

I hope you've been enlightened with this review. Don't forget to check my tutorials at the Tutorials section for more information on Spring WS.

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