Chapter 1. Introduction

   

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This book is an introduction to, and a quick reference for, the Java APIs for web services as implemented in the J2EE 1.4 platform. This chapter begins with a high-level overview of web services, using a real-world example to show why you might need to create one and how it would differ from a traditional HTML-based web application. It then moves on to introduce the technologies that have been developed to enable web services and describes how those technologies have been made available to Java developers. The chapter closes by demonstrating the steps required to build a client application that can communicate with and present information from the web service interface provided by the online bookseller Amazon.com.

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