WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Web Service Design Considerations

You need to consider several architectural design choices when building a web service for WebLogic:

• You need to carefully architect the “signature” for each operation of the web service and decide whether the operation will be invoked in a synchronous request-reply fashion, or in a one-way asynchronous manner.

• You need to decide what type of backend components (if any) will be used to implement the operations of the web service.

• You need to determine whether your web service is designed to be process- or data-oriented. Based on this, you can decide whether the web service implementation is better suited to handling traditional RPC-style invocations or a single XML document that is exchanged between the client and the web service.

• If the SOAP request/response messages need additional processing before/after they are handled, you need to configure the chain of SOAP message handlers that will be associated with the web service operations.

• If the web service is designed to use custom datatypes, you need to determine the structure for these datatypes and how they can be converted between their Java and XML representations.

All these factors influence how you design the operations of a web service and choose a best-fit implementation.

RPC-Oriented Versus Document-Oriented Web Services

When creating a WebLogic web service, you can specify whether its operations are RPC-oriented or document-oriented. In the case of an RPC-oriented operation, the SOAP message ...