After the JavaOne 2003 conference, there is no more doubt that web services are one of the next big things that is going to gain ground in the distributed computing world. The advent of web services is said to be at least as big as the change from mainframes to the client/server architecture. In order to be prepared for this, developers need to quickly acquire plenty of practical knowledge. This book provides an in-depth coverage of how to go about programming web services using J2EE 1.4 and the latest release of Sun's Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP). All this is coupled with an extensive quick reference to Sun's web services APIs.
The book first gives some insights on the purpose of web services and how they are architecturally organized. Then, it delves into the SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ), the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), and the client-side Java API for XML Registries (JAXR). It also investigates the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and deeply explores the Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC). The use of JWSDP's tools and configuration files are examined and explained as well.
Summing up, this book nicely follows O'Reilly's "In A Nutshell" philosophy by being more of a "daily companion" to keep handy than a high-level tutorial. I recommend it to any developer willing to get or stay in touch with the new trends in web services development.
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