WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Using the Web Services Framework

WebLogic provides a rich framework for the development and deployment of web services. Here is a brief outline of the capabilities of WebLogic’s web services framework:

• WebLogic automatically provides a web home page for each deployed web service. The home page includes links to the WSDL document for the web service, the client JAR file that you can download to invoke the web service, and a mechanism for testing each operation exposed by the web service. This last feature is useful particularly during development stages because it lets you debug your web service and inspect the incoming SOAP message requests and outgoing SOAP responses.

• WebLogic lets you expose standard J2EE components as web services. This means that you can implement web service operations using different backend components. For instance, a call to a web service operation may translate to a method call on a standard Java object. Alternatively, the web service operation may be implemented via one of the remote methods of a stateless session EJB. Web service operations also can trigger specific JMS actions — for example, send a JMS message to a JMS destination, or receive a message from a JMS queue.

• WebLogic lets you configure a chain of SOAP message handlers for each operation on a web service. These message handlers can intercept incoming message requests or outgoing SOAP responses, and potentially alter the body of the message. Typical applications of SOAP message handlers include ...