Understanding Web Services

This book introduces the main ideas and concepts behind core and extended Web services' technologies and provides developers with a primer for each of the major technologies that have emerged in this space.

Praise for Understanding SOA with Web Services "This book does the best job of describing not only "where we are" in the timeline of enterprise integration efforts, but also providing strategic guidance for where we need to be. The authors have worked diligently to break down the integration problem into functional areas, and send you down the path of strategic integration utilizing XML Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture as the vehicle of choice. You will love this book!"--Daniel Edgar, Architect, Portland General Electric "E-Government needs a comprehensive guide to SOA with Web Services standards and best practices for implementation to get from the current "as is" to the future "to be" architecture. This book meets that need superbly." - Brand Niemann, Ph. D., Co-Chair, Semantic (Web Services) Interoperability Community of Practice, U.S. Federal CIO Council. "There are many books on SOA available today, but Understanding SOA with Web Services stands out from the pack because of its thorough, outstanding coverage of transactions, reliability, and process. Where most SOA books focus on integration and architecture basics, Lomow and Newcomer fearlessly dive into these more advanced, yet critical, topics, and provide a depth of treatment unavailable anywhere else." - Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC "This book provides a wealth of content on Web Services and SOA not found elsewhere. Although the book is technical in nature, it is surprisingly easy to read and digest. Managers who would like to keep up with the most effective technical strategies will find this book required reading." - Hari Mailvaganam, University of British Columbia, Vancouver "I have been teaching companies and lecturing on SOA and XML Web Services for years and sort of felt at home with these technologies. I didn't think anyone else could teach me anything more significant about either of them. This book surprised me. If a person teaching SOA and Web Services can learn something from this book, you can too. This book is a must-read for all architects, senior developers, and concerned CTOs." - Sayed Y. Hashimi, SOA Consultant "Newcomer and Lomow are no doubt the industry luminaries on the topics of Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, and integration. This book is sure to be a must-have for developers and architects looking to take advantage of the coming wave of standards-based, loosely coupled integration." - Ronald Schmelzer, Senior Analyst ...

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.

Where most SOA books focus on integration and architecture basics, Lomow and Newcomer fearlessly dive into these more advanced, yet critical, topics, and provide a depth of treatment unavailable anywhere else."--Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC"This book provides a wealth of content on Web Services and SOA not found elsewhere. Although the book is technical in nature, it is surprisingly easy to read and digest. Managers who would like to keep up with the most effective technical strategies will find this book required reading."--Hari Mailvaganam, University of British Columbia, Vancouver"I have been teaching companies and lecturing on SOA and XML Web Services for years and sort of felt at home with these technologies. I didn t think anyone else could teach me anything more significant about either of them. This book surprised me. If a person teaching SOA and Web Services can learn something from this book, you can too. This book is a must-read for all architects, senior developers, and concerned CTOs."--Sayed Y.

Like many other incipient technologies, Web services are still surrounded by a substantial level of noise. This noise results from the always dangerous combination of wishful thinking on the part of research and industry and of a lack of clear understanding of how Web services came to be. On the one hand, multiple contradictory interpretations are created by the many attempts to realign existing technology and strategies with Web services. On the other hand, the emphasis on what could be done with Web services in the future often makes us lose track of what can be really done with Web services today and in the short term. These factors make it extremely difficult to get a coherent picture of what Web services are, what they contribute, and where they will be applied. Alonso and his co-authors deliberately take a step back. Based on their academic and industrial experience with middleware and enterprise application integration systems, they describe the fundamental concepts behind the notion of Web services and present them as the natural evolution of conventional middleware, necessary to meet the challenges of the Web and of B2B application integration. Rather than providing a reference guide or a "how to write your first Web service" kind of book, they discuss the main objectives of Web services, the challenges that must be faced to achieve them, and the opportunities that this novel technology provides. Established, as well as recently proposed, standards and techniques (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, WS-Coordination, WS-Transactions, and BPEL), are then examined in the context of this discussion in order to emphasize their scope, benefits, and shortcomings. Thus, the book is ideally suited both for professionals considering the development of application integration solutions and for research and students interesting in understanding and contributing to the evolution of enterprise application technologies.

The web services architecture provides a new way to think about and implement application-to-application integration and interoperability that makes the development platform irrelevant. Two applications, regardless of operating system, programming language, or any other technical implementation detail, communicate using XML messages over open Internet protocols such as HTTP or SMTP. The Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) is a specification that details how to encode that information and has become the messaging protocol of choice for Web services.Programming Web Services with SOAP is a detailed guide to using SOAP and other leading web services standards--WSDL (Web Service Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration protocol). You'll learn the concepts of the web services architecture and get practical advice on building and deploying web services in the enterprise.This authoritative book decodes the standards, explaining the concepts and implementation in a clear, concise style. You'll also learn about the major toolkits for building and deploying web services. Examples in Java, Perl, C#, and Visual Basic illustrate the principles. Significant applications developed using Java and Perl on the Apache Tomcat web platform address real issues such as security, debugging, and interoperability.Covered topic areas include: The Web Services Architecture SOAP envelopes, headers, and encodings WSDL and UDDI Writing web services with Apache SOAP and Java Writing web services with Perl's SOAP::Lite Peer-to-peer (P2P) web services Enterprise issues such as authentication, security, and identity Up-and-coming standards projects for web services Programming Web Services with SOAP provides you with all the information on the standards, protocols, and toolkits you'll need to integrate information services with SOAP. You'll find a solid core of information that will help you develop individual Web services or discover new ways to integrate core business processes across an enterprise.

Applications. Book jacket.

According to recent press reports, everyone is developing Web Services, but many are still in the exploratory phase - learning what's involved and how to achieve ROI. This book is designed to give a working introduction to Web Services to help decision-makers prepare for the implementation in their companies. It demystifies the topic by providing a beginning level explanation of what this technology is, what it means to businesses, where to apply it, and how to make it work. Using numerous simple examples, the book explains the core concepts of Web Services: SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL, as well as tools and related concepts that will help create the "big picture" in readers' minds.