Goals of this Book

The overall goal of this book is to familiarize you with the concept of Web services and what it will take to incorporate Web services as part of your business.

We will introduce the concept of Web services and give you a framework that describes how you can position the various emerging standards that are associated with Web services, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI).

We will help position Web services from a business and technical perspective, explaining and demonstrating how Web services can be used to address various business problems, particularly related to application integration.

Another goal of this book is to help developers understand the issues and details related to building Web services using the techniques covered by this book. What pieces are required when you're planning a Web services strategy? What things do you need to take care of when developing Web services? We provide lots of examples and running code to demonstrate these approaches. We also review in detail the Apache Axis Web services infrastructure with our running examples. Other tools and Web services infrastructures are discussed as well, but not in the same detail as Axis.