Chapter 8: Enabling Business Logic for Web Services

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Overview

Web Services Description Language (WSDL version 1.1, http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl) is an XML-based description language that has been submitted to W3C as the industry standard for describing web services. It is the result of a cooperative effort between IBM and Microsoft. The power of WSDL is derived from two main architectural principles. The first is its ability to describe a set of business operations. The second is its ability to separate the description into two basic units, a description of the operations and the details of how the operation and the information associated with it are packaged.

Chapter 7 concludes with a description of the Service-Oriented Architecture, which is based on the service description capabilities of WSDL. This chapter describes how WSDL is used in a J2EE environment, including a guided tour of how to enable the Catalog EJB in the Plants-By-WebSphere example for access as a web service, as well as how to make a Java client that accesses the service.

The WebSphere platform will support new web services standards and technologies as they appear. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) version 5.0 includes a number of components that support different aspects of web services. The primary focus of this chapter, web services for J2EE, is only one of these components. At the end of this chapter, you'll find a summary of the other web services components included with WAS version 5.0 with resources to continue your learning. A thorough investigation of web services standards and technologies would require a complete book on its own.