E-mail:
[email protected]
Mail:
Michael Stephens
Executive Editor
Sams Publishing
201 West 103rd Street
Indianapolis, IN 46290 USA
Introduction
Welcome to the world of Web services! This is a rapidly evolving set of standards and
implementation technologies that have great promise for the world of application
integration and distributed computing.
Before we get going, we need to clarify some things about the purpose and structure of
the book. Let's talk about them now.
Goals of this Book
The overall goal of this book is to familiarize you with the concept of Web services and
what it will take to incorporate Web services as part of your business.
We will introduce the concept of Web services and give you a framework that describes
how you can position the various emerging standards that are associated with Web
services, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description
Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
We will help position Web services from a business and technical perspective, explaining
and demonstrating how Web services can be used to address various business problems,
particularly related to application integration.
Another goal of this book is to help developers understand the issues and details related
to building Web services using the techniques covered by this book. What pieces are
required when you're planning a Web services strategy? What things do you need to take
care of when developing Web services? We provide lots of examples and running code to
demonstrate these approaches. We also review in detail the Apache Axis Web services
infrastructure with our running examples. Other tools and Web services infrastructures
are discussed as well, but not in the same detail as Axis.
Assumed Background
This book is meant for computing technical professionals with some experience building
Web applications and distributed computing systems. You don't need to be a seasoned
veteran of the distributed object wars to appreciate this book, but some familiarity with
Web-based architectures and techniques such as HTTP and HTML is assumed. If you do
not have any experience with these techniques, some of the material could be a little
confusing—particularly some of the code examples—but you should still be able to get a
lot out of this book.
We assume you are familiar with Java, and in particular the Java Server Pages (JSP) and
Java servlet technologies. We also briefly discuss the relationship between Enterprise
Java Beans (EJBs) and Web services, so some familiarity with EJBs is helpful as well. If
you need to supplement your understanding of these techniques, many, many good
books on programming with Java, JSP, servlets, and EJB are available on the market.