7.2 The Application

The sample application maintains a "wish list," or shopping list, of books at a web-based storefront. For the sake of this chapter, the design goals are kept on the simple side. The server provides the following functionality:

• Get the current wish-list contents in an abbreviated form.

• Pull the data record for a given entry on the wish list.

• Add and remove entries from the list.

• If the user already has billing and shipping information on file, they should be able to trigger the purchase of one or more items from the list.

In the last requirement, the server doesn't handle all the issues around securely receiving a credit-card number or other confidential information. Instead, if the user's customer record indicates that they have all the needed information already on file, they are given the chance to easily make the purchases. The server also allows some operations that aren't user-specific :

• Search for books by author or title, each using substring matching.

• Retrieve a limited subset of information on a given book, less than what is given to registered users but enough to be useful to some extent.

Generally, such an application would provide much more in the way of functionality. But this simple application highlights many situations that can trouble SOAP applications of all size.