Java™ Web Services Unleashed

Using Secure Sockets with SOAP

Although JCE gives you the power to encrypt and decrypt any data you choose, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) provides a simple way to send encrypted data over a network connection. The advantage of SSL is that you no longer encrypt the data yourself—you transmit data over a secure socket just as you do with a regular socket. The SSL implementation takes care of the encryption for you. Because secure sockets work just like regular sockets, they work with all of Java's built-in networking classes. For example, you can use the URL and URLConnection classes with HTTPS URLs as long as your JDK supports SSL.

The Java Secure Sockets Extension implements secure sockets for Java and is built into JDK 1.4. If you need JSSE ...