Web development in general recently emerged from a long period of stagnation. While the web browser has become a de facto operating system for the enterprise application, there used to be only two realistic options for developing them:... more »

Two trends in applications architecture AJAX RIA on the client side and service-orientation on the server side are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. In this session, Kevin Hakman, AJAX veteran and co-founder of TIBCO's award-winning General Interface toolkit, will use real-world case studies to demonstrate how organizations are taking advantage of both of these advancements in application architecture to provide AJAX Rich Internet Applications that double the applicability of SOA investments. Attendees will hear how to deliver feature rich, high-productivity end-user applications to the business desktop.... more »

The Web has become the dominant way to deploy applications. Web applications have numerous advantages over traditional desktop applications. However, the user interface of the application is one area that Web applications have traditionally been weak in comparison to their desktop brethren. The Web has progressed and rich Internet applications (RIAs) offer user interfaces that are competitive with desktop applications. There are many powerful technologies that can be used to create RIAs, but the most popular is certainly Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX.) This article shows you how AJAX can be used in conjunction with Web Services and how the WSO2 technology stack provides a complete solution for creating Web applications using AJAX and Web services.... more »

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an evolution of distributed computing based on the request/reply design paradigm for synchronous and asynchronous applications. An application's business logic or individual functions are modularized and presented as services for consumer/client applications. What's key to these services is their loosely coupled nature; i.e., the service interface is... more »

Service-oriented architecture is one of the most talked about and least understood topics in IT today. It even has its own “Dummies” book. As an approach to building IT systems, SOA connects applications across a network via a common communications protocol, allowing organizations to reuse old software, often with the help of Web services. Saugatuck Technology predicts that up to two-thirds of IT departments will have a limited or full SOA... more »

Web services accessed via HTTP are often at the heart of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). As explained in Service-Oriented Architecture and Java ME, this use of HTTP as a generic data transport is a key reason that Java ME applications can use web services to create SOA-based distributed applications. But HTTP by itself does not a web service make, otherwise every site on the Web would be a provider of web services. A web service is really just a contract between a service provider and its customers where everyone agrees to use HTTP as the transport. But specifying HTTP as the transport isn't enough-the parties to the contract must agree on how they use HTTP to exchange their data.... more »

The SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) provides a standard way to send XML documents over the Internet from the Java platform. SAAJ enables developers to produce and consume messages conforming to the SOAP 1.1 specification and SOAP with Attachments note.... more »

I am in Atlanta for our internal JBoss ESB / SOA training this week. Burr Sutter and his team are doing a great job conveying our SOA vision -- to mesh and reuse services you already built in your "single silo" applications (e.g., a web store and a warehouse management app can share an "order" object when the user confirms an order. Each application then process and save the order in their own ways.).... more »

XQuery offers a rich set of features for working with the structure of an XML document, offering you compelling abilities not possible with XPath or XSLT. In a sense, it's SQL for XML. In this article, Sowmya Hubert & Binildas C. A. look at the Java API for XQuery and how you can use it in your SOA applications.... more »

Web services seem like they should be an enterprise topic, yet JAX-WS 2.0 is part of Java SE, not EE. One of the upshots of this is that you can create web services without needing a full-blown Java EE container. Young Yang shows how this works in practice.... more »