Before you start

Learn what to expect from this tutorial, and how to get the most out of it.

Introduction

A powerful feature of Data Web Services is the capability to apply server-side XSL transformations to Web service requests and responses. This feature allows you to customize the format of the messages that the client sees. This is particularly useful in cases where enterprise or industry Web service format requirements dictate what the Web services messages should look like.

Data Web Services has a default message format when it comes to Web service request and response messages. The message format and the XML tag names in those messages depends on the Web service operation name, result set column-names, and so on. In some cases, you may not want the client to see the default tag names, either due to message format requirements, or because you simply want to mask the default tag names. Using the server-side XSLT feature, incoming XML requests and outgoing results can be made to look different than the Data Web Services default message format.

In general, Web services can be built using either a top-down or bottom-up approach. In a top-down approach, you start with a service specification (for example, a WSDL file) and then implement the underlying code to match that specification. In a bottom-up approach, you start with a Java bean or SQL statement and expose the functionality as Web services. Using the Data Web Services, you start with the DML operations (for example, queries) and expose them as Web services. Therefore, the development style is typically bottom-up. However, by applying XSLT to the service messages, in many cases, you can map the service format of the bottom-up style messages to the top-down design. This alleviates some of the top-down service format requirements while allowing you to develop bottom-up Web services. The transformation can also be used to deliver data to the client in human readable formats such as HTML, JSON, RSS feeds, or any text format that can result from an XSL transform.

This tutorial introduces you to creating and deploying IBM Data Web Services on an application server and also gives an in-depth overview of how to use the XSLT feature to customize the input and output messages of a sample Web service to fit into your custom XML schema.

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Objectives

In this tutorial, you will learn:

• To use the XSLT feature that is now part of Data Web Services.
• To generate a default schema for a sample Web service.
• To apply Web-style transformations to display the output in HTML, JSON, and RSS formats.
• To apply your custom schemas to SOAP messages.

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Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for database programmers who are familiar with IBM Data Studio and know how to perform common tasks such as creating a database connection, a data development project, and SQL scripts or stored procedures. If you are not already familiar with these tasks, you should first complete the tutorial "IBM Data Studio: Get started with Data Web Services" (developerWorks, November 2007). Basic knowledge of XSLT, XSD, and XPath is recommended. Because the examples in the tutorial are all based on WebSphere® Application Server Community Edition server as the target environment, the tutorial assumes that the reader has Data Studio Developer 1.2 installed along with a WebSphere Application Server Community Edition server instance, and a connection to the DB2 SAMPLE database has been set up.

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System requirements

To run the examples in this tutorial, you need:

• IBM Data Studio Developer 1.2 installed on Windows
• IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 1.1.0.2
• DB2 Versions 8 or 9 for Linux, Unix and Windows with the SAMPLE database created.

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• Create a simple Web service
• Generate a default schema for input and output messages
• Transform XML to HTML
• Transform XML to JSON
• Transform XML to RSS
• Assign a custom schema to expose an operation through the SOAP binding
• Conclusion
• Download
• Resources
• About the authors

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Next steps from IBM

WebSphere Application Server can leverage its built in Web Services support to expose services to remote consumers in an industry-standard way.

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• Try: The no-charge WebSphere Application Server Community Edition is a pre-integrated, lightweight Java 5 application server built on Apache Tomcat and includes built in Web Services support.
• Article: Learn how to use of the JAX-WS programming model to create dispatch and dynamic proxy clients and how to create an asynchronous Web service client.
• Tutorial: This tutorial takes you through the steps to deploy Data Web Services to the WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.
• Demo: This demo shows how to extract and install the IBM Java Platform, Java EE 5 SDK with WebSphere Application Server.
• Buy: WebSphere Application Server - Express

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