Web Services

Web Services

Web services represent the latest wave in distributed computing. Although the term web services is bandied about quite a bit, arriving at a concrete definition is difficult because web services is, at the highest level, not specific to any particular technology or platform. It's often defined in fairly abstract terms, like "a substrate for building distributed applications using software running on different operating systems and devices"^[*] or "self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web."^[] Of course, these quotes are taken out of context, but that's the essential point: you need some kind of context to define web services. Here's my definition of web services that has meaning in the context of Java EE, EJB, .NET, and most other web services platforms:

^[*] Tim Ewald, "The Web Services Idea," July 12, 2002, Microsoft.com (http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/understanding/readme/default.asp).

^[] Doug Tidwell, "Web servicesthe Web's next revolution," November 29, 2000, IBM.com (http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/webservices-onlinecourse-bytitle/BA84142372686CFB862569A400601C18?OpenDocument).

Web services are network applications that use SOAP and WSDL to exchange information in the form of XML documents.

To understand this definition, you need to understand SOAP and WSDL. Here are brief definitions of these terms:

SOAP 1.1

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an XML grammar, developed by Microsoft, IBM, and others, that is currently under the auspices of the W3C. It's an application protocol used in both RPC and asynchronous messaging. SOAP is very flexible and extensible and, unlike its predecessors (DCE RPC, CORBA IIOP, Java RMI-JRMP, and DCOM), it's been endorsed and adopted by just about every major vendor. (If you're not familiar with XML, see Java and XML or XML in a Nutshell, both from O'Reilly.)

WSDL 1.1

The Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is another XML grammar, developed by Microsoft and IBM under the auspices of the W3C. It is an XML-based Interface Definition Language (IDL) that can be used to describe web services, including the kind of message format expected, the Internet protocol used, and the Internet address of the web service.

Web services are truly platform-independent. Although Java RMI and CORBA IIOP also claim to be platform-independent, in fact these older technologies require their own platforms. To use Java RMI, you need a Java virtual machine and the Java programming language; a program written in Visual Basic or C++ can't interact with a Java program using RMI. CORBA IIOP is also restrictive, because the IIOP protocol usually requires an elaborate infrastructure like a CORBA ORB, which limits developers to those few vendors that support CORBA or to the Java environment (which includes built-in support for CORBA IIOP).

Web services, on the other hand, are not tied to a specific platform like the JVM or to a technology infrastructure like CORBA because they focus on the protocols used to exchange messagesSOAP and WSDLand not on the implementation that supports those protocols. In other words, you can build web services on any platform using any programming language any way you please.

EJB 3.0 allows enterprise beans to be exposed as web services so that their methods can be invoked by other J2EE applications as well as applications written in other programming languages on a variety of platforms. Web services in EJB 3.0 support both RPC-style and document-style messaging. Support for web services is based on a web service API: JAX-WS. Web services and the use of JAX-WS are covered in detail in Chapters 18 and 19.