Section 10.3. J2EE 1.4 and Web Services

10.3. J2EE 1.4 and Web Services

The main purpose of the J2EE 1.4 specification was to standardize Web Service deployment so Web Services would be portable and interoperable. With J2EE 1.4, you now use a set of standard deployment descriptors to deploy a Web Service so it can be deployed on any J2EE-compliant application server. The J2EE 1.4 specification mandates interoperability with other platforms, so a Web Service deployed on a J2EE application server will work and be compatible with non-Java clients written in: C#, Python, Perl, C++, and so on.

We'll introduce the new J2EE-Web Service deployment descriptors as we go through the process of deploying JAW Motors Inventory-related Web Services. On the server-side, we have to create a Service Endpoint Interface and register it with the deployment descriptors. In J2EE 1.4, you can implement a Service Endpoint as a Servlet or POJO deployed in a WAR file, or as a Stateless Session Bean, but we'll limit our discussion to EJB Service Endpoints.

Let's start by working our way down through the architecture.