Understanding Web Services Specifications and the WSE: Current Amazon U.S.A. One-Edition Data

From the book lists at Adware Report:

All information current as of 19:10:09 Pacific Time, Monday, 21 February 2005.

Understanding Web Services Specifications and the WSE

   by Jeannine Hall Gailey / Jeannine Gailey

  Paperback:
    Microsoft Press
    29 October, 2003

   US$24.49

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Editorial description(s):

From Book News, Inc.
Intended for .NET developers and IT managers, this book offers insight into some of the advanced web service specifications that have been proposed to enhance the functionality of SOAP-based messaging while maintaining the interoperability of web service applications, particularly the security options supported by version 2.0 of Microsoft's web services enhancements (WSE). A familiarity with XML, SOAP, C#, and Visual Studio is assumed.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

About the Author
Jeannine Hall Gailey has been a developer-oriented writer for eight years and, until recently, worked as the documentation manager for the .NET My Services SDK team, which included the Passport, Alerts, and Messenger SDKs, at Microsoft. She has written for several technical journals, including XML and Web Services Magazine, Web Services Journal, the C# Today Web site, and MSDN® Magazine. She was also a contributing author to Microsoft .NET My Services Specification from Microsoft Press, and has two more Web services books in the works with them.

Book Description
Gain insight into some of the advanced Web service specifications that have been proposed to enhance the functionality of SOAP-based messaging while maintaining the interoperability of Web service applications. This essential guide details the support in Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 for these specifications, which include WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Attachments and DIME. You'll learn how to develop .NET Web services and client applications that leverage WSE functionalities to implement secure Web services, with inline code samples derived from a Visual Studio .NET-based Web service solution that you can download from this site. Written by a Web services expert, this book is the developer';s essential guide to understanding and implementing advanced Web services for Microsoft .NET.

Reader review(s):

Great review of WS concepts, April 30, 2004
This is a great book for system architects who build complex, distributed, advanced applications using XML Web services in .NET, or would like to. While admittedly not a code-centric tutorial guide, it does serve to clarify many of the questions a developer considering the Microsoft .NET Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 would have, and demystifies many of the questions posed about interoperability between WSE versions and across platforms like .NET and J2EE.

Contrary to the criticism that some have unfairly labeled the book with, I didn't find the material to be rehashed MSDN articles that would be otherwise easily accessible on that site. Rather, author Jeannine Hall Gailey gives an academic overview of the areas for WSE 2.0 under development by those architecting the web service model on a macro level (BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, etc.). Instead of regurgitated programming articles, Jeannine (whose body of work in writing about WSE and the high-end use of SOAP in .NET environments is most impressive) presents a complimentary collection of easy-to-follow articles on advanced uses for extending SOAP's capabilities, using a writing voice that's welcome and friendly. (You'll surely appreciate this latter benefit, as the material can get quite complex at times.)

So rather than give you code to nail down a specific problem, an overview of the web services model and of next-gen apps relying on SOAP is examined. And you'll more well-rounded and better off because of it. When used in combination with the code found on her articles at MSDN, they make for a very effective guide to helping you build powerful systems.

At 232 pages, the book is a great quick read, giving the reader a high-level understanding of many of the concepts being discusses and/or enforced by the web services powers-that-be. The major WS-* considerations such as attachments, security, reliable messaging, coordination and policy enforcement are described. The book is written beautifully and organized logically, with easy to understand hypothetical scenarios.

The book makes mention of SOAP 1.2, and while it admits to leaning towards the SOAP 1.1 spec for the moment, does take the time to mention the differences between the two. There's also a very healthy amount of information for two technologies you're likely to have lots of questions about - encryption and DIME attachments.

There was a terse mention of working with SOAP messages across SMTP, and I would have liked to see more of a discussion on this topic. There's lots of good information about other transport protocols like HTTP, TCP and UDP, but sadly, not much on SMTP for building secure messaging systems over e-mail. But I can't pin this minor shortcoming directly on the author - the Web is currently sorely lacking such information outside the scope of mentioning that SOAP can transport across SMTP.

But aside from that, this book is a great read for those looking to take SOAP to the next level and really leverage the WSE in their applications.

Most up-to-date information on the WS-Specs and WSE out righ, January 29, 2004
This book gives readers a brief introduction to WS-Specs like WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Attachments, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust and WS-Transactions, and shows how to use the WSE (based on early adopter 2.0 code) in conjunction with these specs. This book is good for someone who is a beginning to intermediate web services programmer, who wants to learn how to use the WSE to secure their web services. I thought Jeannine did a good job of laying out the basics, with enough code samples to walk the reader through. It does require basic knowledge of .NET coding, since the code samples use C#. I'm looking forward to downloading the sample code - although it's based on a beta of the 2.0 code, and all we can download right now is the tech preview. There is no other book out there right now with the 2.0 code, or the latest on the specs, which are still in the process of changing.

Very informative introduction to Web Services., January 28, 2004
This book really increased my understanding of the subject WSE SDK. The code samples helped me understand more about the WS-specifications. The author explains the potential of WS-security and WS-policy and shows examples of how this can be implemented.

This was the most useless book I've seen from MSPress, January 27, 2004
The book offers not more information that can be found on MSDN but formatted much much worse than the MSDN content. There are very few specifics and virtually no detail. The code and XML snippets are hardly described. This material qualified for a magazine article at most, and not for a professional book.

Most up-to-date book on WSE and the related standards, January 18, 2004
As a Microsoft programmer, I've been watching emerging Web service standards with great interest. Having programmed extensively with WSE 1.0, I am eagerly awaiting version 2.0 of WSE as it supports WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, and WS-Policy and its related specifications. Jeannine's book is the only one out there that covers these critical new WSE 2.0 features and specifications, and she gives some great examples of using SecurityContextTokens in a client-service interaction and using policy statements to automate security for a Web service. Since the WSE SDK documentation hasn't been great, this book is a must for WSE programmers. Hopefully, Jeannine will add some TCP-based messaging samples in a future version of this book. As a bonus, she describes some important specifications not supported by WSE, like WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction, and her ideas on where Web services are headed are very compelling. Clearly, this book is on the cutting edge of advanced Web services.

.Net - the future, January 21, 2004
I am a user of .Net Services in a variety of forms. My favorite is Blackboard for teaching. The .Net Specifications book provides a great insight into what can be done with the XML message interfaces. It also shows that a high level of security can be maintained. I am going to keep this book handy as I try to really understand .Net applications.

Great read for web services programming, January 18, 2004
This book helped me understand more about WS-specifications, and to learn to program with Microsoft's new version (2.0) of the WSE. It was easy to read and had useful programming examples.

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