Aggressively being adopted by organizations in all markets, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a framework enabling business process improvement for gaining competitive advantage. Service-Oriented Architecture: SOA Strategy, Methodology, and Technology guides you through the challenges of deploying SOA. It demonstrates conclusively that strategy and methodology are the keys to implementing SOA and provides the methodology needed for SOA success.

The book examines the role of both non-agile and agile project management techniques for deploying SOA. Its...

This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant's claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is...

Beginning with The Simpsons and ending with The Da Vinci Code, the entertaining sections in this book uncover profound philosophical and religious ideas in pop culture. Each work covered contains a challenge to both standard religious orthodoxy and secular science. In The Simpsons Movie, although Homer must be dragged off his couch to church, he experiences a spiritual epiphany with an Inuit shaman woman. In the film of The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon proposes that "the human is the divine." The author makes a striking case here for pop culture as a hotbed of...

Understanding Kant's pre-critical philosophy is central to appreciating his three critiques. Overshadowed by the critiques, the early work stands on its own as a central contribution to the development of the philosophy of its time. In addition, it not only prepares the way for the critiques, but constitutes a hidden background without which they cannot be adequately understood. Here we find Kant's great cosmology, which is what Kant later regarded as the thing-in-itself, persisting behind his notions of the noumenon, the intelligible world, and the postulates of morality. Although he finally...