Brennan,
As someone who's only a few (intensive) months further along the WS path
than Scott seems to be, that is a beautiful summary. Very much in
agreement
with what I've found (but presented with the perspective, I think, of a
lot
more experience).
Very helpful to have things summarized like that! Thank you.
- Steve
p.s. Have you considered writing the book that Scott is looking for? :-) I
certainly spent a lot of time looking for one and didn't find it.
______________________________________________
Steve Gruverman, Programmer
IntelliCare, Inc. | A Medco Health Solutions Company
500 Southborough Drive | South Portland ME 04106
"Brennan Spies" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 04/29/2008 02:00:01
AM:
Scott,
That's a tall order. There's lots to say about this space, and it
won't be contained in one web page. Can't help you with the Xanax,
but I can give you the brief tour of WS in Java. Here goes...
1. At the high level, your first decision is SOAP vs. REST. REST
implies POX (plain old XML)--though it's not necessarily the case,
that's the way the majority of RESTful services are developed. SOAP
is just a message format, but all of the WS-* standards (and there's
a lot of them) and WSDL (at least until v.2.0) revolve entirely
around using SOAP; hence the perceived complexity because there's
more to learn. REST has less structure, so it can be simpler when
developing simple web services; however, if you have other
requirements, such as security or policy, going with REST could be
more difficult and error-prone than SOAP. It's over-simplifying a
bit, but the distinction can be summed up as "go with the standards"
in SOAP or "roll your own" with REST. Taking a look at some of the
more popular web services from Google, Amazon, etc. may give you a
better feeling for this.
2. Your second decision is going to be which Web Services stack to
use. In Java, the major ones are Apache Axis 2.0, Apache CXF, Spring
Web Services, and the JAX-WS reference implementation (on java.net).
You'll have to match their features against your requirements to see
which one fits you best. There's a fair amount of overlap in
features (and even in the 3rd party libs they use), but there are
significant differences as well. I'd recommend not using Axis 1.0 at
this stage, since it is about 4-5 times slower than the newer stacks
under load.
3. JAXB is simply a framework for XML-Java binding, one among many:
JiBX, XML Beans, Castor, ADB, etc. Which one you use may be decided
by which one(s) the stack in #2 you choose supports (you'll choose
JAXB, for example, if you use Sun's JAX-WS reference
implementation), but all except JAX-WS RI support more than one
binding framework.
4. XML Schema is the standard way of defining XML types in
SOAP/WSDL, but there are others. In WSDL 1.2 and 2.0, for example, you
can(
http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl20-altschemalangs/) use Relax NG, but--
practically speaking--XML Schema rules the roost here.
5. Most WS frameworks (from #2) support two basic styles of
development: top-down (write WSDL, generate Java--WSDL2Java, for
instance) and bottom-up (generate WSDL and other artifacts from your
Java code). I prefer the first, but bottom up may be simpler if you
are just starting out, esp. if you already have code that you are
adding a web service to. JSR-181 (JAX-WS) is particularly nice for
this approach, since you just add annotations to your existing code.
6. If you must buy a book, don't buy anything that's been published
more than a year ago. The landscape has changed a lot in the last
year or two. One of my favorites, "J2EE Web Services" by Richard
Monson-Haefel, is already out-of-date.
Well, that's it for the nickel tour. The brush strokes are pretty
broad here, but I hope I've given you a better idea.
Brennan
----- Original Message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 4:37 PM
Subject: The WS Crazy Train!
Can someone either provide me a URL for xanax or a site that
explains the interplay between SOAP/JAXB/WSDL/Schema/blah, blah,
yada. yada? I am trying to figure out what is actually necessary to
produce & consume web services in Java and I am hearing that many of
these technologies are optional! In fact, today it was decided that
WSDL2Java produced too many artifacts and that writing web services
could be much simpler. How do RESTful web services play into this
mix, and what are the pros/cons to the permutations of ws stacks? I
would gladly throw down my AMEX if someone can recommend a good
book/resource that might clear this confusion.
Peace,
--
Scott
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
