With accelerating adoption amongst organizations of all types and sizes, SOA is increasingly becoming the mainstream paradigm for enterprise IT architecture and software development. SOA offers immense potential to increase ROI, enhance organizational agility, and reduce IT burdens, but many organizations have not yet achieved the benefits it promises. Fortunately, with SOA's growth, best practices and use cases for successful implementation are now emerging. This book captures the most valuable of these - and presents them simply, accessibly, and in a form that IT professionals can use. Drawing on their unsurpassed field experience, renowned SOA expert Thomas Erl and his team of expert contributors bring together practical solutions to the most common problems faced by those attempting to drive value from SOA. They offer trustworthy, proven advice for SOA projects of all sizes, including enterprise challenges such as integration, security, and governance. Along the way, they demystify confusing concepts such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and loose coupling, introduce specific patterns for success, and show how to avoid the catastrophic design errors that have compromised many SOA initiatives. * The accessible, jargon-free SOA introduction for today's IT pro * Answers the questions today's IT pros ask most often - about topics ranging from Enterprise Service Bus to loose coupling * Presents patterns associated with SOA success - and shows how to avoid the worst SOA design errors * The newest book in the best-selling Thomas Erl Service-Oriented Computing Series