Web Services Essentials: Distributed Applications with XML-Rpc, Soap, UDDI & Wsdl - Softcover

Cerami, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596002246 ISBN 13: 9780596002244

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2002

Synopsis

As a developer new to Web Services, how do you make sense of this emerging framework so you can start writing your own services today? This concise book gives programmers both a concrete introduction and a handy reference to XML web services, first by explaining the foundations of this new breed of distributed services, and then by demonstrating quick ways to create services with open-source Java tools.Web Services make it possible for diverse applications to discover each other and exchange data seamlessly via the Internet. For instance, programs written in Java and running on Solaris can find and call code written in C# that run on Windows XP, or programs written in Perl that run on Linux, without any concern about the details of how that service is implemented. A common set of Web Services is at the core of Microsoft's new .NET strategy, Sun Microsystems's Sun One Platform, and the W3C's XML Protocol Activity Group.In this book, author Ethan Cerami explores four key emerging technologies:

• XML Remote Procedure Calls (XML-RPC)
• SOAP - The foundation for most commercial Web Services development
• Universal Discovery, Description and Integration (UDDI)
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL)

For each of these topics, Web Services Essentials provides a quick overview, Java tutorials with sample code, samples of the XML documents underlying the service, and explanations of freely-available Java APIs. Cerami also includes a guide to the current state of Web Services, pointers to open-source tools and a comprehensive glossary of terms.If you want to break through the Web Services hype and find useful information on these evolving technologies, look no further than Web Services Essentials.

About this title

Review

Web Services Essentials is an overview of XML Web services, aimed primarily at Java developers with some existing knowledge of XML. The main subject is SOAP, which is widely supported in the industry. After a general introduction, the author describes XML-RPC, an older and simpler alternative to SOAP. Next comes a quick introduction to the SOAP specification, followed by two chapters on getting started with Apache SOAP. These show how to set up a Web service using the Apache Tomcat server, and how to invoke the service with a Java client. An important chapter covers WSDL, the description language that enables clients to locate and invoke Web services. The last part of the book is a look at UDDI, a means of publishing Web services in a directory. In these three final chapters, the book introduces UDDI, describes its Inquiry API, and offers examples and a quick reference for the UDDI 4J client toolkit, enabling programmatic retrieval of UDDI data. A plain-English glossary at the back of the book provides welcome help for those perplexed by SOAP jargon.

This is not an in-depth title, and is best regarded as a first book on SOAP. Its scope is narrow, and given that one of SOAP's strong features is interoperability, it is disappointing to find little information on non-Java implementations. Another O'Reilly title, Programming Web Services with SOAP, has a better stab at this by including Perl and Microsoft .NET alongside Apache SOAP. On the plus side, there is considerable detail on UDDI, which is a topic skated over by some other SOAP introductions, and overall the book is succinct and well-presented. --Tim Anderson

Review

A broad, yet comprehensive guide to web services. -- David Coulson, LinuxFormat, August 2002

This book as a whole covers its material as you would expect. If you are wanting an introduction to creating web services, then it is a good place to start. -- Joel Smith, news@UK, Dec 2002

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0596002246
• ISBN 13: 9780596002244
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304