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Java Web Services in a Nutshell
I expected this book to be similar to other "Nutshell" books that I like and am familiar with: a very accurate and concise description of the domain, followed by a huge API reference. Well, I was pleasantly surprised: this book reads more like a tutorial, yet it is a reference in the sense that you can easily read its parts independently, and its index is quite useful and complete.
The book covers all technologies necessary for defining, implementing, and deploying Web Services for both client and server sides:
- WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), the XML-based interface definition language (and more); CORBA folks: this is your IDL for the Web Services platform, only not as easily read or understood. Not to worry: there are GUI-based editors for this thing, many of them are free. Plus the book explains WSDL format and structure in a great detail.
- JAXR, a client-side interface for extraction of business and service information from the compliant Web Service registries.
- JAX-RPC (two chapters: basic and advanced); at the application level this technology is similar to CORBA using Java.
- JAXM, a high level standard-based generic interface to messaging that is implemented by a messaging provider. It offers the benefits of asynchronous messaging, robust message delivery, and message profiles (use of SOAP message headers).
- SAAJ is a low-level Java interface to SOAP; under the hood some of the mentioned technologies use it.
For each of these technologies the author dedicates enormous effort to showing intricate but very relevant technical details without obscuring the big picture. There is a necessary but not overwhelming amount of Java code and XML. You will be able to reuse the examples since they are very clear.
The book has a chapter on Web Services tools and configuration files. This is a very helpful chapter: the business of defining deployment descriptors by hand is a messy job; presence of this chapter makes the job a bit easier. A small but helpful API reference may be found at the end of the volume.
If you need to understand the details of how to build, implement, and deploy Web Services, you will not be disappointed. There is absolutely no hype in this book! Considering the topic, nowadays this alone is an achievement.
Web Services technology is not the "Web Stuff," it is not related to browsing the WWW, and it does not pertain to the services offered by the WWW vendors (unless Web Services is what they sell). It is a fast-growing technology for programming in the distributed computing environment. Judging by the hype and money being spent on it by the leading powerhouses, it is going to be very prolific and important technology in the near future. Want to know more? -- Read the book!
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I wish they had managed to call it something besides "Web Services" when it doesn't have a lot to do with the "World Wide Web". That's been the biggest point of confusion I've found trying to explain web services to semi-technical people.
The services part hasn't been much better than the Web part, but at least it's mostly fitting.
The book reviewed is a pretty good overview. I just wish they had spent more time on typical internal corporate uses and tools to convert/interact with existing legacy software products.
You can find some similar related books at BUR - Web Services/Soap. I am looking forward to the days when standards like this combined with older stuff like XML and CSS make combining and processing data from disparete sources becomes a lot easier than it typically is now!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I expected this book to be similar to other "Nutshell" books that I like and am familiar with: a very accurate and concise description of the domain, followed by a huge API reference. Well, I was pleasantly surprised: this book reads more like a tutorial, yet it is a reference in the sense that you can easily read its parts independently, and its index is quite useful and complete.
The book covers all technologies necessary for defining, implementing, and deploying Web Services for both client and server sides:
* WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), the XML-based interface definition language (and more); CORBA folks: this is your IDL for the Web Services platform, only not as easily read or understood. Not to worry: there are GUI-based editors for this thing, many of them are free. Plus the book explains WSDL format and structure in a great detail.
* JAXR, a client-side interface for extraction of business and service information from the compliant Web Service registries.
* JAX-RPC (two chapters: basic and advanced); at the application level this technology is similar to CORBA using Java.
* JAXM, a high level standard-based generic interface to messaging that is implemented by a messaging provider. It offers the benefits of asynchronous messaging, robust message delivery, and message profiles (use of SOAP message headers).
* SAAJ is a low-level Java interface to SOAP; under the hood some of the mentioned technologies use it.
For each of these technologies the author dedicates enormous effort to showing intricate but very relevant technical details without obscuring the big picture. There is a necessary but not overwhelming amount of Java code and XML. You will be able to reuse the examples since they are very clear.
The book has a chapter on Web Services tools and configuration files. This is a very helpful chapter: the business of defining deployment descriptors by hand is a messy job; presence of this chapter makes the job a bit easier. A small but helpful API reference may be found at the end of the volume.
If you need to understand the details of how to build, implement, and deploy Web Services, you will not be disappointed. There is absolutely no hype in this book! Considering the topic, nowadays this alone is an achievement.
Web Services technology is not the "Web Stuff," it is not related to browsing the WWW, and it does not pertain to the services offered by the WWW vendors (unless Web Services is what they sell). It is a fast-growing technology for programming in the distributed computing environment. Judging by the hype and money being spent on it by the leading powerhouses, it is going to be very prolific and important technology in the near future. Want to know more? -- Read the book!
http://www.cgisecurity.net/ws/
http://www.cgisecurity.net/development/java.shtml
9 - good
8 - average
7 - poor
The last ten book reviews on slashdot have ratings that all fall within this range. The lowest had a rating of 7, the highest, 9.
Without looking at the specific title in question - O'reilly's nutshell books are usually light on the instruction and heavy on the reference. Their regular books are the opposite.
I have two words for you: compress and encrypt. :-)
Business-critical XML should be sent over SSL or something similar...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Yeah, but I know PHP and Perl, and I've got ~ 2 months to fully implement and get working with external providers, so, I'd rather not learn Java at this stage...
geek. lawyer.
I know in some eyes XML-RPC is looked at the idiot cousin of SOAP but it works and in my opinion is a lot easier. (I believe Redhat uses it as part of their "up2date" software updating facility). Particularly nice is being able to write the XML-RPC server in Python (or any of the other supported languages) while accessing it via a php client (though you can do the XML-RPC server in php too). Also - Wrox's Professional PHP4 XML (misleading name somewhat) has extensive chapters and examples of using XML-RPC with PHP. And code is available via their web site too (as is the above O'Reily book)
If the "XML" part of "XML-RPC" fills you with trepidation you should know that you the XML is really all under the covers and there is no need to create dtd's, etc.
A good place to get the started with XML-RPC first visit www.xml-rpc.com.
Nice job with the line breaks there, buddy!! Because of your mistake (and the editor's) anyone who is really interested in this topic will have to suffer through horizontal scrolling (big deterrant).
Don't the editors have a preview button (or common sense for fsck's sake)?
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
- Castor is a free tool which allows you to convert XML to Java objects and back. If you build a servlet that returns the XML string that represents an object then you essentially have a Web Service.
- Apache Axis a free implementation of SOAP and web services. Oddly enough, if you browse the source code of Axis you'll see Castor packages.
Just two technologies that wern't mentioned in the article. You might find them more useful than the ones that were.