Best of this Week Summary 20 - 26 May 2007

• This is a very interesting story about the the converging of the concepts closely related concepts SOA and Web 2.0.
  

  "The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of
  services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse."

  "Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise."

  A difference that is still there is that Web 2.0 sees data as the most important, in SOA services are the most important. The diagram in the post nicely shows the relationship between the two. It mentions also that it is interesting to see that the market chose REST as being web-oriented, not SOAP.
  Related to this, note this interesting new tool from Microsoft: Astoria (download). It allows any ADO compliant database (e.g MS SQL Server) to be accessible via REST, thus web-enabling it.
  
  
• Here is an interesting extract from Mark Hansen's book "SOA Using Java Web Services". It explains REST and SOAP and their differences. Then it describes the tools and techniques for implementing SOA Java components using the REST paradigm. As an example the integration of an Order Management System (e.g. SAP) with a Customer Service System (Siebel CRMA) is used. Both the client and server side are explained. The example is shown w/o JWS and then with JWS. For many decisions an explanation is given, some are very basic though (e.g why not to store redundant data). Data transformation via XSLT using the JAXP API is also described.
  
  One major tip: even for REST, use XML Schema (XSD) to define the message structure interface, such that client applications can comply to the valid message structure.
  
  
• A quick look at Guice , the dependency injection framework by Google. It discusses a google tech talk about Guice and then goes through some examples on how you would configure in Guice vs Spring. In Guice you configure everything with annotations instead of XML. The writer isn't convinced this is better, neither am I.
  
  
• A short description and list of 15 free SQL injection scanners. Amongst others for MySQL, MS SQLServer, Oracle.