Chapter 14. EJB 2.1: Web Service Standards

Web services have taken the enterprise computing industry by storm in the past couple of years, and for good reason. They present the opportunity for real interoperability across hardware, operating systems, programming languages, and applications. Based on XML, SOAP, and WSDL standards, web services have enjoyed widespread adoption by pretty much all the major enterprise players, including Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and others. Sun Microsystems has integrated web services into the J2EE platform; specifically, Sun and the Java Community Process have introduced several web service APIs, including JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-based RPC), SAAJ (SOAP with Attachments API for Java), and JAXR (Java API for XML Registries). These web service APIs have been integrated into J2EE 1.4 and are supported by EJB 2.1.

This chapter provides an overview of the technologies that are the foundation of web services: XML Schema and Namespaces, SOAP 1.1, and WSDL 1.1. Chapter 15 provides an overview of JAX-RPC, the most important web services API.

Web Services Overview

The term web service means different things to different people, but thankfully the definition is fairly straightforward for EJB developers because the J2EE platform has adopted a rather narrow view of web services. Specifically, a web service is a remote application described using WSDL (Web Service Description Language) and accessed using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) ...

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