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Axis meets MOM

Reliable Web services with Apache Axis and MOM

By Gautam Shah, JavaWorld.com, 02/20/06

Over the past few years, SOAP has become the de facto standard and backbone for enabling inter-application communication. For the most part, SOAP has been successful in realizing the promise of cross-platform, cross-language integration of devices and software applications that need to communicate.

The strength of SOAP is in its simplicity, flexibility, and its universal acceptability. It lays out simple rules and an XML language of communication between devices and software that need to interact. These rules have been established by the World Wide Web Consortium and backed by industry heavyweights such as IBM, Microsoft, BEA, HP, and Sun Microsystems.

Most existing Java or Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) applications that cater to specific business functions do not support such SOAP-specific XML consumption and generation. When undertaking standards-based integration efforts, these applications need to talk the language of SOAP and XML. Hence, for business applications that provide critical business functions, a need exists for a bridge layer that can consume and generate SOAP-specific XML. Apache Axis is the open source platform that provides the bridge layer between your applications and SOAP-based Web service interactions.

The Apache Axis Java toolkit provides a thin layer of in-direction between the client wishing to speak SOAP and the server wishing to understand SOAP. The beauty of Axis is that the same toolkit can be used at both the client and server. When used by the client, the Axis toolkit serves as an intermediary between native Java and the underlying encoding of information sent to the server in SOAP XML format. When used to enable a server as a Web service, the toolkit's role reverses and serves as an intermediary between underlying SOAP XML encoding and native Java.

Most common SOAP-based Web services implementations are over the HTTP protocol. However, in implementations that require SOAP to be enabled over a protocol more reliable than HTTP, message-oriented middleware (MOM) is an obvious choice. In addition, the features of commercially available MOM, such as guaranteed message delivery, transactional support, encryption, high performance, and high availability, make the case for combining SOAP and MOM more compelling and appealing.

Axis implementation for HTTP-based SOAP is straightforward. However, enabling Axis over MOM has not always been easy. In this article, I examine key components that come bundled in Axis and introduce additional components that are needed to let Axis work with MOM.

Please refer to resources Resources for the basics on SOAP and Axis.

Benefits of MOM

MOM-based Web services are not suitable for all types of applications. Ideally, they are suited for interaction between applications within an organization or between organizations that require SOA (service-oriented architecture) implementations with service-based consumer and provider paradigms. For such implementations, a MOM-based architecture offers the following benefits:

 

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