The original intention of web services was to provide a mechanism to integrate different systems together. The systems could be running on different operating systems that are hosting applications written in different programming languages. The basic technology underlying web services is XML, which is can be transported between systems using a variety of protocols, most commonly HTTP or HTTPS. XML makes for a power conversational language, not only because it is human readable, but because everything is represented as a String, with specific rules defined for how that String value should be interpreted. This is important because “250” will be interpreted as 250 regardless of whether your application is written in Java or C/C++ or if it is running on Windows or Unix. There is no ambiguity with things like “big endian” or “little endian” interpretations of bytes.... more »

Previously, I wrote a post describing the use of Apache Axis to create and consume Web Services from Java. In this post, I will describe how to use JAX-WS to create and consume web services. I used Glassfish application server for this application. The Web service and the Web Service client are both web applications.... more »

In the past, I wrote a post on how to implement Web Services using JAX-WS on Glassfish, and Apache Axis. In this post I will describe how to implement Web Services using the Spring framework and Apache Axis. The spring framework uses JAX-RPC API to help implement and access SOAP-WSDL based Web Services. The main components required for implementing and accessing Web Services in Spring are:... more »

The first milestone release of WSIT is now available, and this blog will show readers how to develop a WebService from scratch using the Netbeans 5.5 Beta release and add Security to the WebService. In particular we will show how to enable SecureConversation for the service.... more »

S3 is a file storage and serving service offered by Amazon. In this article, Eric Heuveneers demonstrates how to use Amazon S3 via its simple REST API to store and serve your own documents, potentially offloading bandwidth from your own application.... more »

This tutorial discusses the concepts of REST and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and shows how they apply to services. It also shows how to use Java technology to implement REST/APP-based services.... more »

So you think you know the Java ME graphic APIs? Bruce Hopkins catalogs the current APIs, complete with examples, drawn from 13 JSRs.... more »

Many in the media are already calling on the demise of SOA and saying that it's just a passing phase, or it's really just a rebrand of the EAI space, or that it will be segmented only to certain integration-type challenges. We have a bit of a different take. The term SOA will go away over the next several years but it will go the same route that e-commerce applications went. If you think back to the mid-'90s, we started talking about e-commerce as an architecture that was distinct from the then traditional enterprise architecture. However, over the past few years, e-commerce as a term has disappeared because it has become the ubiquitous expectation for how we build applications, or what those applications do (some kind of commerce). It consumed the entire enterprise application space.... more »

Using Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) technology to design and develop Web services yields many benefits, including simplifying the construction of Web services and Web service clients in Java, easing the development and deployment of Web services, and speeding up Web services development. This tutorial walks you through how to do all of this and more by developing a sample order-processing application that exposes its functionality as Web services. After going through this tutorial, you'll be able to apply these concepts and your newly acquired knowledge to develop Web services for your application using JAX-WS technology.... more »

Einstein made that famous statement many decades ago, and it's still relevant today for building superior software systems. Unfortunately, as anyone who has been in the IT industry for long can point out, far too many software systems have failed Einstein's test. Some are made too simple to carry out the duties they are supposed to perform. Others are made too complex, and the costs of building and maintaining them have rocketed, not to mention the nearly impossible tasks of integrating different systems together. It seems that reaching the right level of simplicity is more like a dream than reality. Where have we gone wrong?... more »