Review By: Dmitri Ilkaev
05/06/2008The book is an excellent guide to the current SOA technologies as well as their limitations. It starts with analysis of the performance and scalability issues in the current SOA world. Author Frank Cohn presents FastSOA as a concise architecture directed to improve scalability, governance, and performance of SOA by using native XML database and XML Query (XQuery) technologies. FastSOA covers the concept of the Enterprise Data Bus as XQuery and SOA extension and platform to build well performing and flexible SOA. Cohn also presents methodologies and tools to test SOA system scalability and performance. Cohn also gives a practical guide to software developers, architects, and CIOs for rapid development and delivery of highly scalable, well performing, and maintainable services.

The book contains descriptions of FastSOA patterns at the architectural level and also shows FastSOA mid-tier services and data caching architecture applied in several real-world scenarios. The scenarios show how to accelerate SOA performance and mitigate performance problems through mid-tier service caching, native XML persistence and mid-tier data transformation, aggregation, and federation.