Arun Batchu Blog from Mar 22, 2009

I am a fan of MalcolmGladwell's writings. His new book Outliers is a pretty thought-provoking book. He has surprising observations that if true, should affect how you view success. He has a few suggestions about how to increase the probability of innate talent being successful and leads the thinking mind to an open-ended landscape to figure how to retool and create the string of "accumulative advantages" for talent to become an outstanding success - an outlier.

While the work might be as block-bustery as his previous works ([Blink] an [TippingPoint]), still, this is one of the more readable and insightful and definitely opinionated body of writing.

I enjoyed it but then, I enjoy and derive value from almost any work.

I am not sure why I am mentioning this, but I did read it on the [AmazonKindle].

Having worked with SOA for so long in Java I probably know quite a lot on the subject. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the Java SOA cookbook and how it helped me cover some of the landscape that had changed while I was busy building stuff. As of this time of writing the note, I have gone through only one chapter - on RESTful webservices. Yet the way the author treated that subject was wonderful. It is perhaps one of the most forceful, clear and definitive argument about and for RESTful services. I have been working with RESTful services for 2 years, but like most under-cover, shoe-strung-budget projects, been unable to completely contemplate, code and champion the purist ways of doing it.
This chapter by [EbenHewitt] ( is he Australian?) where he cooks evocative and clear recipes of RESTful services in JAX-RS (the new API) and his thoughts on what real REST means - is crystalline.
After Richardson's book, just this chapter alone merits that this book/chapter should be on the reference table for every SOA effort using Java.
I am not sure about the other chapters yet, but that chapter enhanced my knowledge a lot on a subject that I already know quite a bit.

I also wanted to note how I got to it. Through the Safari Oreilly subscription. I have a personal subscription to their entire library. So, now, I just search for keywords (excellent search interface) that I am trying to research. In this case, it happened to be the Jersey implementation of the JAX-RS API. Since the API is new, there were only a few references that were returned and one of them happened to be this book. And, what a wonderful, serendipitous discovery that!