Conclusions

This chapter presented a detailed analysis and sample application to demonstrate integrating Struts with a Web Services application.

Among the important points of the chapter were

• Web Services fit with Struts Model components . That is, they should be called from the Struts Action class and likely represent an interface to some data or business logic in a remote system.

• Web Services are a technology based on communication and encoding of data in XML. The SOAP protocol is used for communications of data.

• Serializing data is the process of converting data in your program into an XML representation that's independent of any particular computer language or platform. Deserialization is the opposite : It's the process of taking data in an XML format and converting it into a format useful for your program to use.

• Axis is a Java-based Web Service framework and SOAP engine. It's open source and developed under the umbrella of the Apache XML Project. Its home page is http://xml.apache.org/axis.

• Java2WSDL and WSDL2Java are two utilities made available as part of Axis that provide significant support in terms of automating the development of Web Services applications using Axis.

• By utilizing a Struts application design based on the use of value objects to carry data one bean at a time and also the use of a facade class to isolate the Action class from the details of the actual Web Services communications, it's possible to greatly simplify the development and maintenance of Struts applications based on Web Services.