Professional Java SOAP - Henry Bequet

Web services are currently the main area of growth in the computing industry as a whole, but also more specifically in Java. While there are many associated technologies with web services, SOAP has had the most progress and is now adopted as a W3C standard, known as SOAP 1.2 or XML Protocol (XP).;SOAP is exciting not because it is a new concept but because the whole IT industry is agreeing to use it. It can be compared with CORBA, Microsoft's COM+ or DCOM, and Sun's RMI, but unlike those technologies, it is language and Operating System agnostic. You can build your application in any language you wish and, as long as it is connected to the Internet, it will talk to any other SOAP application out there.;The underpinning of the web services explosion is therefore, SOAP. It is used as the underlying protocol in ebXML and every major player in this area (including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, BEA, Jakarta) have tools for developing SOAP applications. In addition there are numerous web and application servers with added SOAP functionality.;The book is organized in three parts: Distributed Application Protocols, Sample Application, and Web Services. In Chapter 1, "Distributed Application Protocols", the major distributed application protocols are looked at and their pros and cons are compared. In Chapter 2, "The Lingua Franca of the Web is SOAP", the SOAP specification is reviewed in detail and a closer look at the SOAP implementation that we will use in this book: Apache SOAP is taken. In Chapter 3, "Setting Up your SOAP Server", the details of downloading and configuring the necessary software to get your SOAP server up and running are considered. In Chapter 4, "LeSavon.com", the requirements for the sample application are discussed. Chapter 5, "SOAP Server", is where SOAP services are designed and implemented.;In Chapter 6, a client framework that should be useful when the development of the sample application with its user interface is wrapped up is written. Chapter 7, "Security and Personalization", discusses a possible integration strategy to an LDAP-based enterprise security system. Chapter 8, "Caching", discusses how the addition of a rule-based cache system can tremendously improve the performance of our application. In Chapter 9, "Performance", the performance of the sample application is analyzed and the design and implementation choices that we made in the previous chapters are validated. Chapter 10, "Web Application", concludes the second part of the book with the addition of a Web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) to our sample application. In the third part of the book, Web services are formally defined.;Chapter 11, "WSDL", introduces the reader to the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), a key technology that promotes the interoperability of software components over the Web. In Chapter 12, "Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)", the sample application as a Web service is published and how potential users can query the UDDI registry to discover our services is discussed.