Web Services

Web Services

Enable real-world trading partner collaborations in SOA
This article is part of a series of short articles that introduce readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles provide a quick introduction to these standards, their backgrounds, underlying architectures, benefits, status, and industry adoption. As some of the content may be a depiction of the authors' viewpoints, readers are encouraged to refer to the links provided in Resources to gain a deeper understanding of a particular standard. This article focuses on Web services-enabled trading-partner collaboration standards that influence a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Leo Fernandez, Ash Parikh and Varun Gupta, August 2006

Secure your SOA
This article is part of a series of short articles that introduce readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles provide a quick introduction to these standards, their backgrounds, underlying architectures, benefits, status, and industry adoption. As some of the content may be a depiction of the authors' viewpoints, readers are encouraged to refer to the links provided in Resources to gain a deeper understanding of a particular standard. This article focuses on the XML and Web services security standards that influence a service-oriented architecture.
Ash Parikh, Anthony Sangha and Murty Gurajada, April 2006

Describe business process activities as Web services
This article is part of a series of short articles that introduce readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles provide a quick introduction to a standard, its background, underlying architecture, benefits, status, and industry adoption. As some of the content might be a depiction of the authors' viewpoints, readers are encouraged to refer to the links provided in Resources to gain a deeper understanding of a particular standard. This article focuses on the Web Services Business Process Execution Language standard being developed by OASIS.
Ash Parikh, Vivek Kondur and Premal Parikh, October 2005

The power behind the SOA repository
This article is written for readers looking at and considering efficient, flexible, and standards-based approaches to implementing real-world service-oriented architectures, or SOAs. With the proliferation of Web services and, hence, SOAs as viable approaches to developing and enhancing software architectures, it is imperative to acknowledge that the amount of SOA data will also continue to grow. Furthermore, as the Web services standards stack broadens in functionality, the number of SOA artifacts required to support these new standards grows by the day. We must recognize the obvious need to store, manage, query, manipulate, and transform SOA data. Also, requesting applications frequently access SOA data. A case can thus be made for a mid-tier cache that exposes technology-independent, reusable, and functionality-rich services, hence, improving SOA scalability and performance. Additionally, as enterprises engage in collaborations with trading partners, interaction with complex schemas becomes a challenge. Thus, more than just a simple XML persistence mechanism is needed. A native XML data management server lends itself seamlessly to such complex demands for SOA data management.
Ash Parikh, Robert Smik and Premal Parikh, June 2005

Get familiar with ebXML Registry
This article is the first of a series of short articles that will introduce readers to the industry's various Web services standards. These articles will provide a quick introduction to a standard, its background, underlying architecture, benefits, status, and industry adoption. As some of the content might be a depiction of the author's viewpoint, readers are encouraged to refer to the links provided in Resources to gain a deeper understanding of a particular standard. This article focuses on ebXML Registry from OASIS.
Ash Parikh, April 2005

SAAJ: No strings attached
Developers rightly criticize SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for being overly complex. At heart, however, SOAP is only an XML message format, and its complexity relates more with how we put SOAP to use. In its simplest form, SOAP can exchange structured messages between a Web service and its clients. Since SOAP messages are not limited to XML data and can also include binary content, sending and receiving SOAP messages represents a simple way to exchange information across the Web. In his latest Web Services column, Frank Sommers shows how the SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) 1.2 supports creating, parsing, and sending SOAP messages with binary content.
Frank Sommers, September 2003

J2EE 1.4 eases Web service development
The latest J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) specification, version 1.4, makes Web services a core part of the Java enterprise platform. A set of JSRs (Java Specification Requests) in the Java Community Process define how J2EE components can become Web services, how existing enterprise Java applications can invoke Web services, and adds new interoperability requirements for J2EE containers. This article reviews J2EE 1.4's new client and server programming models for Web services.
Frank Sommers, June 2003

The first taste of Liberty
Prompting a user to separately log into closely affiliated Websites creates an awkward user experience. Web services that rely on one another may not even permit separate logins since they must operate without human intervention. The Liberty Alliance Project specifications provide a single sign-on mechanism for both Websites and Web services. This article explores how Liberty helps federate a user's identities from different service providers and uses that federated network identity to authenticate a user to many Web-accessible services. The article concludes with an example of how two Websites can use single sign-on.
Frank Sommers, March 2003

I like your type: Describe and invoke Web services based on service type
The Web Service Description Language (WSDL) provides an XML grammar for defining and advertising a Web service, including a service's type. This article gives an overview of how to describe a Web service with WSDL. Frank Sommers uses Apache Axis tools to create WSDL from Java interfaces and Java classes from WSDL documents. He also shows how to programmatically interact with WSDL based on emerging Java APIs for WSDL (JWSDL) and how to dynamically invoke Web services using IBM's reference JWSDL implementation.
Frank Sommers, September 2002

Publish and find UDDI tModels with JAXR and WSDL
This article presents a programming model for publishing and discovering Web services based on service interfaces. It starts by defining reusable WSDL (Web Services Description Language) interface documents and shows how to register those interfaces as UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) tModels using the Java API for XML Registries (JAXR). Then the article focuses on how Web service clients use well-known tModels to discover and invoke services that adhere to a set of interfaces.
Frank Sommers, September 2002

Supplement: The adventures of JWSDP
Frank Sommers examines the current array of Web services tools, specifically from Sun Microsystems' toolkit, Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP). See the main article to this supplement, " Web Services Take Float with JAXR."
Frank Sommers, May 2002

Web services take float with JAXR
Learn how you can describe and advertise your Web service so that others can find it, and how you can locate services on the Web in this second installment of our Web Services column. Frank Sommers takes an in-depth look at the Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) and its existing reference implementation, which ships with Sun Microsystems' Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP). (Check out " Supplement: The Adventures of JWSDP.") JAXR provides an API to register with and search a variety of standards-based Web service registries.
Frank Sommers, May 2002

A birds-eye view of Web services
This article inaugurates JavaWorld's new Web Services column. The column will examine Web services technologies from a programmer's perspective and explore where Web services fit into a Java developer's toolbox. To kick off the column, Frank Sommers defines Web services, explains how they operate, and compares them to related Java technologies. He also presents a general programming model for Web services, independent of any framework or technology.
Frank Sommers, January 2002