Java Web Services

The Java Web Service (JWS) Standard

Not to be confused with the topic of this book, a newly proposed standard called the Java web service ( JWS) standard is currently in development. It is spearheaded by BEA Systems, which also has a reference implementation.

The JWS is a format designed to integrate non-Java developers with J2EE. Sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? BEA has actually designed a technology that might work. At the core of the JWS specification is the idea that developers don’t create J2EE components. Rather, developers create a web service, and a single Java class represents web service implementation. The Java class then has a number of simple, predefined JavaDoc tags that indicate different behavioral implementations of the web service. Based on the values of the JavaDoc tags inserted into the Java class, a behind-the-scenes code generator then creates all necessary J2EE components required to implement the web service.

The JWS JavaDoc system has tags representing a full range of web service behaviors, including stateless methods, stateful methods, and asynchronous invocations. The challenge left to JWS implementations is to take the definition of the JavaDoc tags and generate J2EE components that implement this behavior in a reliable and available manner.

The JWS proposal is appealing because tool vendors can support BEA’s prototype implementation quickly. It comes with a nice IDE that ties together design, coding, and testing. The concept of deployment is completely ...