Chapter 8: Consuming Web Services

Overview

Up to this point, we have built three different Web services: the mortgage calculator, the weather forecaster, and the hotel reservation system. Although we have built test clients for each, we have not built productive applications to consume them. We will now take the opportunity to switch roles and work with our Web services from this new perspective. Consuming a Web service presents different challenges than does building a service, but you will see that they both rely on the same technologies and our understanding of them.

As you go through this chapter, keep in mind how much effort we are putting into the design and coding of our Web services consumers. We've already seen how building Web services can get pretty involved, and it might be discouraging to think that consumers would have to put just as much effort into consuming them. Fortunately, you should find that the considerations that we give to the model and design of our Web services will pay dividends to our consumers in terms of integration complexity and effort.

One thing that we should definitely be assured of is that we will not dictate the platforms and tools that our consumers use. To demonstrate the ubiquity of Web services, we will consume our Microsoft-based weather service through a Java application and our Java-based mortgage calculator through a Microsoft-based Web application. We will then walk through an implementation of our hotel reservation Web service, incorporating this process into an existing conference registration system.

Note 

All three Web services are available online on the book's companion site (http://www.architectingwebservices.com) so that you can build these consumers and test them against a working Web service.




Architecting Web Services
Architecting Web Services
ISBN: 1893115585
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 77

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