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Welcome to Java Web Services and XML
This is the general community for Web Services and XML. Check
the Community Resource links on the left page of this page. This community includes two other communities: the JWSDP
implementations are grouped in the
jwsdp subcommunity
while the Relax NG subcommunity covers projects in that schema language.
 HR-XML Announces Web Services Profile Initiative for Employment Screening
The HR-XML Consortium announced today the formation of an initiative to deliver a web services (WS) profile for background checks and other employment screenings. HR-XML's WS profile for screening will build upon the Consortium's existing Background Checking specification, which enjoys significant support among leading employment screening providers.
Employment screening service providers will be able to leverage HR-XML's WS for screening for easier, less expensive integration with channel partners, such as applicant tracking systems. The profile's web services security guidance also will provide screening service providers best practices with respect to advanced message-level security options, including XML encryption and XML digital signature. The profile will benefit applicant tracking and other HR solutions by giving them a ready-to-use template for adding new screening providers as well as adding or extending search types in response to customer requirements.
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Some cynical views on SCA
Another buzzword around at the moment is IBM's Service Component Architecture (SCA).
There is an article on developerWorks that describes SCA - Service Component Architecture
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Design by Contract for Web Services
Contracts are important for Web services. Design by contract (DBC) is nothing new, but, unfortunately, formal precondition and postcondition specifications have never become mainstream, at least not in the way they were presented by Bertrand Mayer in Object Oriented Software Construction.
However, with the advent of Web services, I think it's time to re-introduce DBC to the mainstream. Here's why
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Integrating Web Services into Feeds
FeedBurner, feed management provider, launched a new service, FeedFlare, which enhances the way subscribers, publishers and Web services interact with RSS feeds. Subscribers to FeedFlare-enabled feeds will see an integrated suite of Web services meta-data and actions related to the content items, such as a live display of the most popular tags for the item, an ability to email or save the item to a social bookmarking service, and more.
FeedFlare will be available immediately to the more than 100,000 publishers currently using FeedBurner subscription services including some of the most popular bloggers and podcasters as well as commercial publishers. Separately today, FeedBurner announced that Reuters, the world's largest international multimedia news source, has become its latest commercial publisher customer.
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AJAX-Schmajax
I find it rather amusing (actually reminiscient might be more accurate) to see the flurry around AJAX. In particular, the number of companies that are springing up out of nowhere with 'AJAX desktops', 'AJAX Office' and 'AJAX messaging'. Feels like I'm back in 99. TechCrunch does a rather good job of following these developments.
The delivery of 'web services' does not mean 'something delivered via a web browser'. Hopefully people will pick up on that sooner rather than later. Java developers have been there for some time already. The notion of Web 2.0 is exciting, but people are getting too wrapped up in the browser paradigm. Javascript, SOAP and XML are cool, but I've yet to see a compelling interface delivered via a web browser that didn't use Flash or Java. Most remind me of Windows 3.11 with pastel colours.
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Web services for dummies
When organizations and services expose their content using APIs, there needs to be a way for others to call and transport that content. There are two current methods for doing this - which can be characterized as 'Simple' or 'Complex'.
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On OO, SOA, and OOP-G
In Modeling Web Services using OO and moving on, Savas Parastatidis recently posted that object-orientation is a poor choice for modeling large-scale distributed applications. As he argues (and I agree), Service-Orientation is a better way to architect these applications.
My product, the Digipede Network, is built on a service-oriented architecture. So why do we Digipudlians talk so much about object-orientation (e.g. here and there)?
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Consuming a WSDL Webservice from ASP
Last week I exposed my site, 123aspx.com, as a SOAP webservice. However, most webmasters feel you need to run ASP.NET or the SOAP toolkit to take advantage this service. This isn't necesarily true, with a little ingunetiy and the latest XML parser from Microsoft, you can consume SOAP services from a traditional ASP page. This tutorial will show you how.Last week I exposed my site, 123aspx.com, as a SOAP webservice. However, most webmasters feel you need to run ASP.NET or the SOAP toolkit to take advantage this service. This isn't necesarily true, with a little ingunetiy and the latest XML parser from Microsoft, you can consume SOAP services from a traditional ASP page. This tutorial will show you how.
The Meebofication of web services
A couple months ago, I was behind a client's corporate firewall and needed to sign on to AIM to communicate with my office. After several frustrating attempts to get AIM Express to work, I began a search for a replacement. I figured there had to be something out there that let you sign into chat services via the web. I was disappointed by the results of my search - there's been very little done in this area, it seems.
However, the one salient site I found completely blew me away. That site was Meebo, and I've been a huge fan ever since. It puts all your chat services into one easy to use web interface. It's based in AJAX, so it does a decent job of simulating windows on a desktop. You can drag the various chat windows around within the browser, and even close, minimize, and resize them. Best of all, it's remarkably stable and looks great too!
 Swish - an open source web services-based workflow API and engine.
Swish is an open source web services-based workflow API and engine.
The name Swish is an acronym derived from the phrase Simple Web services Interface to Shark. Shark is a powerful open source workflow engine framework based on WfMC standards and developed using Java.
Swish provides a convenient web services layer on top of Shark, offering two key benefits
 Part II:Using Spring to consume web services; advanced example using Google Web APIs doGoogleSearch
I should point out that what I am about to show is not necessarily the quickest way of getting the Google Web API doGoogleSearch up and running. In this particular case Google already provides a Google Web API Developer's Kit which you could use to do all of the functionality I am about to describe, indeed some of the precompiled Google Web API package will be interchangeable with what I am about to generate using the Axis WSDL2Java tool but I hope this example will give you some ideas that can be applied to web services in general and not just the Google Web API.
In my last blog entry, I showed how you can access doSpellingSuggestion with Spring and since this service only returns a String there was no particular complexity involved. doGoogleSearch returns a more complex response and so I am going to use Axis' WSDL2Java tool to generate the beans that I will need to capture this more complex response. Remember that WSDL2Java is intended to produce Axis specific code and since I'm using Spring to do the web service access I don't actually need all the generated Axis code. I downloaded Axis 1.3 and created an Ant script containing the relevant Axis WSDL2Java Ant task.
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Part I:Using Spring to consume web services; simple example using Google Web APIs doSpellingSuggestion
I have recently been investigating the Spring Framework and turned my attention towards Spring's offerings in the field of web services. I have had several previous encounters with web services and have even tried hand coding SOAP messages (an experience not to be recommended). The Jakarta IO-taglib is very useful for knocking up simple stuff (like XML-RPC pings) and Apache Axis has come a long way since Apache SOAP in making things much simpler especially with its JWS instant web services. As you would expect from Spring there is also a nice way to create web services (ServletEndpointSupport) but as the Axis method is so simple already it probably doesn't really add that much to this area.
Almost paradoxically it seems to me that since Axis introduced JWS it has always been much easier to produce web services than it is to consume them. The real effort is needed on the client side rather than at the server. Granted Axis has some great tools like WSDL2Java that can generate most of the Java I need to talk to a web service but despite peoples best efforts to persuade me that this is all quite simple, once I've actually looked at the source code produced it makes me recoil in horror. SoapBindings, Stubs, Skeletons and ServiceLocators, yuck! I know my horror is based on a fundamental lack of understanding but I don't really want to be bothered dealing with stuff like that, I'd rather things like that were done by someone or something else. WSDL2Java wouldn't exist at all if this stuff was easy to produce now would it?
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Jini builds foundation for SOA
The Jini Technology Starter Kit was recently made available under the Apache License 2.0. Jini, best known as a network communications technology, also is a service-oriented architecture with advanced capabilities.
In a nutshell, an SOA allows a client application, or consumer, to use a service provided by another application, or provider. This usually involves some form of asynchronous messaging or the calling of functions in applications on remote systems (remote method invocation).
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How to design a fully configurable SOA system with MS .NET? -- Part1 Introduction
No need exploring the concept SOA, here you just think it as the architecture based on Web Services. The SOA here is just used to attract your eyes! J The case in this article consists of both the Service provider and the Service consumer, or simply, both the server end and client end. The case project, which I call it OFT for short, is a real project in Xxx Corporation whose intern I am now. Briefly you can get an initial view about it that we supply various services based on the employees' information and corporation organizations information. Also other information, such as employee article, essays, patents, etc. The basic service is employee and organization information query. Requirements are gotten from corporation's group administrators, managers and other possible stakeholders. We get their requirements and add new function, which we called as Feature, to the system. The features are implemented in Web Service most times, but some time we may do it in our service client. As a common model, we supply the client application on the web.
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Modeling Web Services using OO and moving on
We have embraced the Web as a way to make information available to the world. We have built search, retrieval, and presentation solutions for that information. We are now using the Web to build service-oriented solutions. We are already starting to see examples of the Web - as a platform - being embraced within the enterprise. Here are few questions for all of us to consider... How can we support the next generation of application lifecycle in this new, Web-driven technology world? How can we design, build, test, deploy, maintain applications in this new world of distributed services? How can we enable the next generation of service-integration (e.g. mash-ups). Can we do this using declarative means? Can we use domain-specific vocabularies to declarative describe contracts (e.g. SSDL, WSDL), policies (WS-Policy), other things? How can we combine REST (resource-orientation) and MEST (service-orientation) to support new, interesting distributed applications? These are the topics we should be discussing in the blogosphere and not what would have happened if MS had supported CORBA.
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Thinking SOA in a WebLogic Environment
I was working at a client where they had various J2EE applications deployed on WebLogic 8.1 and needed help with transforming their application assets into Service assets for SOA. Also, they were in a very strict timeline, which meant no major rework of application code. During our discussions, questions regarding Web Services were often raised, and I felt it is not uncommon to think Web Services not not just Services as building blocks for SOA. Their concerns were around converting their application components into Web Services, and what implications will it have to their overall environment and operations.
It is not surprising that many think of Web Services to be the building block of a SOA infrastructure. I think it can be one but not necessarily the building block for SOA. I will tell you why and how we can think of application components deployed on WebLogic Server as Services that is part of a SOA.
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JAX-RPC DII, why did they bother?
Web services, love em or hate em they are here to stay. I've been told they were introduced to replace CORBA, and fill in for its shortcoming. Whether or not this was the initial intention or has been achieved, it does succeed in providing standardized interoperability between systems built on dissimilar technology.
Web Services have borrowed heavily from the CORBA concepts. The two major means of accessing CORBA services (Correct me if I'm wrong) are through static stubs/skeletons, and the Dynamic Invocation Interface. The good folks at Sun have put together an API for accessing Web Services, JAX-RPC. It supports three access types, static stubs, dynamic proxies and dynamic invocation. Creating static stubs using wscompile is acceptable in 95% of use cases, and works as it should. On the other hand, the JAX-RPC implementation of DII lacks the functionality required in 95% of it?s use cases.
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JAX-WS, a step in the right direction
My body is unable to keep pace with my brain. It continues to churn out though after though, yet I find myself unable to commit them to ink (digital or otherwise). Perhaps brevity is a double edged pillow; it is quick to spew and provides a concise read. Who seeks exposure to a long winded dissertation on the merits of an 80 character code break?
Having been away from the Java Web Services scene for a few months, I decided to its progress. I was pleasantly surprised by the direction taken for JAX-WS (rip RPC). It looks like they have taken a page from the WSE handbook
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If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear if fall...
Does it make a sound?
That's the sense I got today when I read that IBM, SAP and Microsoft had decided to discontinue their UDDI registry. Does anyone care about this anymore? I'm actually a bit surprised that this announcement didn't make more headlines. The real news here is that a UDDI registry still exists!
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Flexible Identity Federation XML Gateways to The Rescue
At run time, the Web service verifies the signature of the SAML assertion, checks that it trusts this particular issuing authority, then checks that the message is received within the validity period of the SAML assertion, then verifies the signature of the message itself (Boris's signature), and finally, checks that the signature uses the same cert as the one specified by the holder-of-key SAML assertion.
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 Cape Clear Releases True Enterprise Service Bus for IBM WebSphere Environment
Cape Clear Software announces immediate availability of Cape Clear ESB for WebSphere, the only true Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that is fully integrated and optimized for the IBM WebSphere environment, including the WebSphere Studio family of IDEs, WebSphere Application Server, and WebSphere MQ. Cape Clear ESB for WebSphere also provides support for iSeries (AS/400), and integration with DB2 and the Tivoli suite of products for monitoring and management.
(Dec 19, 2005)
Schema-Aware Queries and Stylesheets
XML Schema-awareness is an optional feature. Not every product will support it, and not every query or stylesheet will use it. You might consider it to be an advanced feature, which will only be needed by the most demanding applications. However, I'd like to persuade you that schema-awareness in XSLT and XQuery is something that you should consider using all the time. It's similar to the situation with XML itself: you can create and manipulate XML documents without ever validating them against a DTD or schema, but many experts will tell you that that's not good practice in anything other than a throwaway use-once application. Similarly, you can write queries and stylesheets that don't use schema-aware features, but I think that you're losing something by doing that.
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Consuming JAX-WS with .NET
In my first JRoller entry, I discussed creating a web service Using JAX-WS 2.0, and now for some fun, I want to show you how easy it is to consume that Java web service using the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 - most importantly, that it does in fact work.
You'll want to start by downloading the free Visual C# Express tool from Microsoft. I use this to check syntax as I write code and it contains their WSDL tool which we'll find comes in pretty handy. All of the compiling I'll do through the command line, so anyone with Windows should be able to follow along.
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Using JAX-WS 2.0
I've been working with some technologies to web-service enable my next personal project. I read an article some months back by Frank Sommers called "Three Minutes to a Web Service" that really got me interested in them. Web services are something a lot of people talk about but, because of their complexity and limitations, few actually use. Fewer still write about their experiences. The article gives you an idea how JAX-WS 2.0 on Java 5 can simplify web service development through annotation processing. In practice, however, I found the experience to be quite a bit more difficult.
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The Decade of the Component - Service orientation is just the beginning
I guess, before I start my day, I need to get this out of my system: You know what's happening right now? It's the decade of the component! The 1970/80ies were the decade of structured programming, the 1990ies were the decade of object orientation - and now we're right in the middle of the decade of component orientation.
Why am I saying that instead of calling if the decade of service orientation? Because what's happening is a struggle for a definition and infrastructures of components as building blocks that get manufactured independently. But everybody is talking about services, you say. That's true. But services are just the starting point of a larger movement. After having been in object orientation up to our chins, there needed to be a next step up the abstraction ladder. Objects (or classes for that matter) are too fine grained as to enable us to build large systems.
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Review: Building Web Services And Rich Clients With NetBeans IDE 5.0
Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the NetBeans Community have chosen not to rest on their laurels following the noteworthy success of NetBeans 4.0 and NetBeans 4.1. Instead, they have pushed forward with the development of NetBeans 5.0 which is currently in its second beta release, and will soon be available to the general public. This newest version of the IDE continues the effort that was started with NetBeans 4.1 to facilitate the development of robust Web Services and other server-side processes. However, version 5.0 also offers a number of new features to help developers build rich clients too. In addition, NetBeans 5.0 offers some other unique development features that basically put this IDE in a class by itself.
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Myths And Realities of Web Services
Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have been the holy grail in computing for at least 20 years.
After all, the idea behind Web services, such as reusing code so applications don't have to repeat basic tasks when they speak to each other, is re-making the Web as a more dynamic global communications network. Want to add mapping features to your site? Maybe the ability to add a few "pushpins"? Welcome to the data-exposing world of Web services and the protocols they're built upon.
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How to: Specify an Alternate Element Name for an XML Stream
Using the XmlSerializer, you can generate more than one XML stream with the same set of classes. You might want to do this because two different XML Web services require the same basic information, with only slight differences. For example, imagine two XML Web services that process orders for books, and thus both require ISBN numbers. One service uses the tag while the second uses the tag . You have a class named Book that contains a field named ISBN. When an instance of the Book class is serialized, it will, by default, use the member name (ISBN) as the tag element name. For the first XML Web service, this is as expected. But to send the XML stream to the second XML Web service, you must override the serialization so that the tag's element name is BookID.
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Web Services + JSON = Dump Your Proxy
In my post on "How to build a Maps Mash-up" I mentioned that there are different ways to overcome the browser security restrictions to retrieve data from another domain (cross-domain restriction). The previous sample used the software proxy method to make the Web service requests and this post talks about a way to make a request without a proxy. It?s the dynamic script tag method.
Today Yahoo! added a new output option for part of their Web services called JSON. This makes it possible to make the JavaScript WS request without using the XMLHTTPRequest object. It is a great way to pull data from another domain because you can dump your proxy and all the data will not route through your server anymore. I will talk about the pros and cons of both these approaches later, but first I want to give an overview of what JSON is, how it works and show some sample code.
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Alexa turned into web service - Amazon back to its innovative best
John Battelle just posted that Amazon is opening up its Alexa search data and tools to the world! According to John, Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index, which is about 100 terabytes of data. With this move anyone will be able to use Alexa's index to develop their own services. As John wrote:
"Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ?well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er?Amazon's) platform, should they wish."
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How does ServiceMix compare to Tuscany or SCA
The Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a specification that was announced on November 30, 2005, with the support of IBM, BEA, Oracle, SAP, Iona, Sybase, and other software vendors. SCA is often described in conjunction with the specification for Service Data Objects (SDO).
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Usefulness of SOA Maturity Models
Recently, I have had the opportunity to review SOA Maturity Models (SOAMM's) from a few different sources for a project in which I am participating.
Today I was on the phone with Michael Kuhbock, Chairman of the Integration Consortium and he pointed me to a recent ICBlog post he had written that takes issue with the usefulness of these models.
Michael suggests that while SOA Maturity Models may be helpful for assessing an organization's progress on the roadmap toward SOA adoption, they are not general purpose enough to be used to measure overall IT capability in the same way that a model such as the CMM / CMMI models.
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IBM launches WSDM tools for SOA management
IBM today has rolled out a new set of Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) development tools, designed to create a common management interface for disparate systems and management tools inside a service-oriented architecture.
Built on the Eclipse integrated development environment framework, the new software is available for a free download on IBM's AlphaWorks site. The WSDM development kit comes courtesy of IBM's autonomic computing wing, which seeks to create self-managing systems capable of supporting loosely coupled architectures, like SOA, while decreasing the complexity of running those systems.
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(Dec 15, 2005)
What is IBM Autonomic Integrated Development Environment?
IBM has developed a set of software development tools that embrace the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard, helping to ease IT management burdens by defining an architecture for connecting computing resources with management applications through standard- based interfaces. In this architecture, an autonomic manager communicates with one or more resources (servers, databases, etc.) through manageability endpoints. An endpoint is a thin layer of code that translates between the standard interfaces and product-specific commands. The Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard was ratified to a 1.0 level by the OASIS standards organization earlier this year. IBM Autonomic Integrated Development Environment (AIDE) provides tools, such as the IBM Manageability Endpoint Builder and the IBM Manageability Endpoint Simulator, to assist in deploying WSDM-enabled solutions.
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Building a SOA...Service Descriptions are Key
With the advent of Web services, most enterprises that I deal with now have thousands sometimes tens of thousands of services under management. Mixing with the service provider world, there are even more.
While we do have some interface information about these services, as defined by standards such as WSDL and UDDI, we really need a more complete set of info surrounding the services in order to create a proper SOA. This information should include things such as; the purpose, interfaces, parameters, rules, logic, owner, semantics, included services, and other important data. Let's call this what it is, a service descriptions.
I believe that before understanding the need for service descriptions, we need to first better understand what's information is already available within existing standards such as WSDL and UDDI.
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On Jon on Eric on RPC and XML
I just read Jon's post on Eric's appearance on a recent Sys-Con panel. Eric raised made an interesting point about the challenge in thinking about distributed systems from an XML document perspective instead of an RPC perspective. Jon agreed that RPC vs. doc/lit was an interesting issue, but I don't think it's the right one. You have to be careful with the term doc/literal. It's really a WSDL detail meaning simply that the message payload is accurately described by the referenced XSD (as opposed to encoded, where that is not the case). Doc/literal is orthogonal to the issue of whether the architecture or programming model is focused on RPC, async messaging or document transfer. In the MS space, ASP.NET Web Services are doc/literal (by default), but the programming model is RPC. Indigo is doc/literal (by default) and the most talked about programming model is RPC, but other programming models are possible. Biztalk is primarily about document transfer, but you can use it to do RPC and async messaging as well (at least that's how I think of it).
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Tuscany boosts SOA effort
An open source project promoting SOA is afoot at Apache.
Implementations of runtimes for the newly announced Service Component Architecture proposal are being floated at Apache and featured in the organization's Tuscany project. SCA was unveiled last month with the goal of simplifying development of SOA.
"The point of SCA is to produce a simple programming model for SOA and Tuscany is [intended] to give people an open source runtime that they can build SOA components on Java, in C++," and enable these components to work together, said Paul Freemantle, a participant in Apache. He also is a co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2, a Web services software platform company.
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Interop and Date or Time values
While many people have moved beyond the fundamentals and are working on secure, reliable, transacted webservices, or on adding those kinds of quality-of-service to other interop mechanisms, the fundamental data-type interop issues are still with us.
Date and Time values are a case in point. One source of interop troubles: a Java app can serialize a nil Date, while in .NET the xsd:date maps to System.DateTime, which is a value type. What does a .NET app do when it receives a nil date sent from a Java app? (Answer: by default, it chokes.)
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XML Schema to Object Mappings - Issues and work arounds...
I've written previously about the mismatch that sometimes happens when trying to map XML to a language implementation class. Some of the issues that I've run into are probably worth documenting.
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Binary XML: the battle starts
Apparently the battle on Binary XML has started. I wrote about Binary XML a couple of weeks ago, and now Rich Turner, product manager for MSFT's Web Services strategy team, has decided to attack the skeptics who feel Binary XML is a bad idea. One of them was me, as he refered to my opinion on Binary XML I wrote earlier, and which was quoted on the ZDNet blog.
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