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.

Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006
The goal of the SWS Challenge is to develop a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The intent of this challenge is to explore the trade-offs among existing approaches. Additionally we would like to figure out which parts of problem space may not yet be covered. The workshop aims to provide a forum for discussion based on a common application. This Challenge workshop seeks participation from industry and academic researchers developing software components and/or intelligent agents that have the ability to automate mediation, choreography and discovery processes between Web services. This Challenge is related to but distinct from the IEEE Contest in several respects. First, the SWS Challenge focuses on the use of semantic annotations: participants will be provided with semantics in the form of natural language text that they can formalize and use in their technologies. Second, this is a challenge rather than a contest, meaning that workshop particpants will mutually evaluate and learn from each others' approaches. Finally, because of this methodology, we will limit the number of participants to a relatively small group. There will be a publishing opportunity.

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  (Jan 08, 2006)

Developing your Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents an opportunity for IT organizations to deliver exceptional reaction to the demands of their business. While not a new concept, the emergence of web services and various standards over the past several years are making SOAs viable for the first time as globally distributed business applications. As SOA reaches certain levels of maturation in its interoperability goals, we can see how SOA makes critical enterprise requirements a reality. Adaptability, performance, scalability, availability, and management of a highly distributed service environment, all the while linking to legacy IT assets is a solid reality with the introduction of SOA into your corporate environment.

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  (Jan 08, 2006)

Really Simple WSDL Discovery
My colleague William Henry may be onto something with his idea for using RSS as a WSDL discovery mechanism, avoiding the overhead of a UDDI-based solution when you don't need it. I can easily imagine StrikeIron and XMethods and others adding RSS feeds that include pointers to the WSDLs they list, as an additional mechanism for publishing links to the services they list. These types of Web pages are service directories, after all, and pages like these already provide a good alternative to a registry/repository solution for lightweight browsing and discovery.

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Merrill Lynch Sells Its Web Services Vendor A Web Services Tool
Merrill Lynch is reversing the tables and, instead of paying its Web services vendor SOA Software Inc. for tools, it's selling a Web services tool it invented to SOA. A team of developers at Merrill Lynch, a large mainframe user, built X4ML in 2001 to make its legacy CICS (Customer Information and Control System) transaction systems available as Web services. X4ML is currently exposing and consuming 600 Web services for 40 key Merrill Lynch applications and processing 1.5 million transactions per day, said Andy Brown, chief technology architect of Merrill Lynch, in a recent teleconference announcing the sale.

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RSS For SOA Services Registry
Today there are really two fundamental ways to connect to a Web service. Either you bootstrap the consumer with the services WSDL file or you use a UDDI registry to lookup a service. Before I go any further I want to point out that I am not against UDDI. I am not trying to replace UDDI. UDDI is the right and standard approach for discovering Web services. In fact I think that my idea can compliment UDDI - more on that later. The problem for some people is that UDDI is a substantial investment in terms of licensing, programming to the APIs, and perhaps hosting. When I say some people I mean organizations that have only a a few services. UDDI seems like a lot of infrastructure for basically looking up a Web service. And if I don't want to bootstrap what other alternative do I have?

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CFP: Workshop on Web Services-based Grid Applications (WSGA, with ICPP-2006)
Based on the successful 2005 ICPP workshop "Workshop on Web And Grid Services for Scientific Data Analysis (WAGSSDA)", this workshop will continue the examination of how ideas from the Grid world are being transformed into a layer above Web Services by scientific researchers who are exploring these technologies to see if they can help satisfy their needs. While the concepts of the Grid have had tremendous promise, thus far this promise has not been fully realized. On the other hand, simple web-based technologies have transformed Web pages in powerful and dynamic content, which are being further enhanced by emerging Web Services. Many feel that Web services-based applications may be the solution that will allow the Grid to realize its potential.

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SAP NetWeaver offers the best of ESA and BPM
The Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) applied in IT environments enables the aggregation of web services into useful elements with business value. ESA is an application based on a service-oriented architecture and an object oriented design. ESA signifies a state in which the IT architecture becomes flexible enough to keep pace with the existing and anticipated requirements of an organization.

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iTKO's Lisa Puts the Test to SOA Web Services Apps
In enterprise software, testing is everyone's right and responsibility, according to iTKO, Inc. And "only (iTKO's) LISA automated testing solutions offer unmatched breadth and depth in software testing across multiple platforms, for everyone on the team," the company says. "With LISA, developers, QA testers, business analysts, and even your end users can get involved in testing throughout the development lifecycle." The company's LISA Complete SOA Test Suite, for example, was built from the ground up for the distributed service-oriented architectures (SOAs) businesses are adopting today. Unlike other point testing solutions that are based on specific client platforms, code-level coverage or user ?screen testing? paradigms, LISA natively talks to multiple technologies and exercises every application layer, the company says.

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Zapthink's Roadmap to SOA Adoption
Companies today are struggling with the best way to implement IT infrastructures that enable business agility. Service-oriented architectures based on Web Services provide cost-effective approaches to achieving companies? agility goals. ZapThink's Roadmap to SOA adoption is a one-of-a-kind, full-color 24x18" poster that provides organizations of all sizes and types an at-a-glance view at how to approach implementing Service-oriented architectures in a way that provides return-on-investment (ROI) at each step along the path toward agile IT infrastructures.

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ESA from SAP
SAP, which is one of the leading enterprise solutions providers, has released a technology blueprint referred to as the enterprise services architecture (ESA) that will enable companies to keep up with the changing trends in the information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

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Issues with authorizations in an architecture of autonomous services
The problem is with authorizations in a world of autonomous and loosely coupled web services. Autonomous in the sense that they live their own life and may contact any other service they see fit, although most likely constrained to some extent by the hosting environment. And loosely coupled in the sense that they participate in higher level processes, that may be reconfigured or extended - or new ones may be created and wired to use our service. It used to be that users would be authenticated basically once and then the user interface would restrict what a given user was able to do. And if things get a little more complicated, which they normally do, the backend will check again in more detail to see if a given request or transaction should be allowed to proceed. Determining if a user is authorized to perform an action is mostly a matter of checking membership of a group, and more rarely also of checking e.g. if the amount requested is below the maximum allowance of a given user.

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Developing Web Services Using JAX-WS
Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0, JSR 224, is an important part of the Java EE 5 platform. A follow-on release of Java API for XML-based RPC 1.1(JAX-RPC), JAX-WS simplifies the task of developing web services using Java technology. It addresses some of the issues in JAX-RPC 1.1 by providing support for multiple protocols such as SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, XML, and by providing a facility for supporting additional protocols along with HTTP. JAX-WS uses JAXB 2.0 for data binding and supports customizations to control generated service endpoint interfaces. With its support for annotations, JAX-WS simplifies web service development and reduces the size of runtime Jar files.

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Web Services - Soup to Nuts
When you set out to develop a new Web service, do you start banging out angle brackets right off the bat, or do you sketch out the logic of your service first? For most engineers, the graphical approach to implementing business logic is much more accessible. Only after a picture is created does the complexity of translating it into code come into play.

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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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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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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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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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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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