Java™ Web Services Unleashed

Summary

In this chapter I introduced a task-oriented framework for evaluating Web services tools. The main tasks for providing services are Create, Deploy, Test, and Publish, and those for consuming services are Discover and Access. The boundaries between these tasks are not absolute, but instead depend on the facilities that the runtime provides. Within the Create task, I further discussed the main approaches, which are Top-Down, Bottom-Up and Meet-in-the-Middle. The Bottom-Up approach will be the most important one in the immediate future because it provides a way to quickly turn existing business functions into Web services. As the industry matures, standard Web service interfaces will emerge and the Top-Down approach will become more important. ...