Chapter 9. Using Enterprise JavaBeans in Web Services

Web services today play an increasingly important role for enterprise applications. In particular, Web services enable an open, interoperable means of communicating between businesses over the Internet. Web services technology represents a new paradigm for enterprise applications to integrate with other applications within an enterprise, as well as at customer, supplier, and partner sites.

This chapter presents concepts, techniques, and code examples for applying Enterprise JavaBeans technology toward Web services applications. The chapter

• Introduces Web services technologies and shows how to use them for application integration

• Explains how to expose an existing EJB-based enterprise application as a Web service

• Shows how to develop a new Web service using enterprise beans

• Shows how to use Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) to access a Web service application from an enterprise bean

• Illustrates how to integrate an enterprise application with external systems, using Web services from entity beans with bean-managed persistence

The same Benefits Enrollment application example discussed in the previous chapters forms the basis for the examples illustrating these Web services topics. Star Enterprise must integrate the Benefits Enrollment application with health plan applications provided by external companies. We show how to use Web services technology to integrate the Star Enterprise's Benefits Enrollment application with these insurance companies' health plan administration applications.