You can build web services client applications to deploy to WebSphere using the command line tools that ship with WebSphere itself (WSDL2Java) or other tooling of your choice, but the most productive way to build application code to deploy to WebSphere is to use the appropriate offering from the Rational Software Development Platform. The Rational software development products are based on Eclipse 3.0 and provide a comprehensive application development environment for creating and maintaining J2EE-compliant enterprise application systems. This development environment includes many features not available in Eclipse.

Following are some of the functions provided:

Create service provider

Use Rational Application Developer tools to create, deploy, test, and publish web services bottom-up from existing Javabeans, enterprise beans, DADX files, and URLs, and top-down from WSDL. Wizards support the automatic generation of additional artifacts, such as a JavaBean proxy to easily access the web service, and a test client.

The Rational tools also include a WSDL editor to facilitate the development of web services using the best practice of defining the types and interface in WSDL first and generating the Java artifacts from the WSDL.

Create service consumer

Use the web services client wizard or command line tools to create a client for any web service. Only the WSDL file is needed to create a Web service client.

Secure the client

The web service wizards and deployment descriptor editors help you configure Web services security (WS-Security) for the WebSphere Application Server environment.

Run web services

Run web services provider and consumer components in various WebSphere Application Server versions, Tomcat, and other test environments. The deployment and administration for the WebSphere test environment is integrated into Application Developer.

Test web services

Test web services running locally or remotely. For local tests, you can use the WebSphere test environment. The WebSphere test environment contains a complete WebSphere Application Server runtime environment. Rational Application Developer provides different functions to test web services.

Discover web services

Browse Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registries or Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) sites to find web services for integration. The Web Services Explorer provides the necessary functions to discover a web service.

Publish web services

Publish web services to a UDDI V2 or V3 Business Registry, using the Web Services Explorer.

Build skeletons

Generate JavaBean and EJB skeletons from WSDL files. This can be helpful during the development and test phase of a project. For example, when the service is defined (WSDL), but not running at the service provider site, and the client needs to be tested, you can create a test service provider to emulate the provider.

Validate web services

Use the WSDL and DADX validators to check for structural and semantic problems in these types of files. This feature is useful in checking that a service WSDL file from a service provider is valid.

Check compliance

Different WS-I profile compliance tests and levels can be defined for the web services development environment. Rational Application Developer can check compliance for the Simple SOAP Basic 1.0 and the Attachment Profile 1.0.

When web services are created or changed, the WS-I compliance tester will analyze the service, and depending on the configuration, ignore, suggest, or require profile compliance. You can define this in the web service preferences.

Work with WSDL files

Rational Application Developer provides wizards and functions to help you work with WSDL files:

• Use the graphical editor to create a WSDL file from a template and to add WSDL elements (service, port, port types, messages).
• Create WSDL documentation; this creates HTML documentation for the WSDL file, similar to a JavaDoc document.
• Validate the WSDL file for WS-I compliance.

Navigate Web services

Rational Application Developer now organizes web services together in a web services group in the Project Explorer, which makes is easier to find and work with web services.

The table below shows the web services-related technologies and specifications supported in Rational Application Developer V6.

Rational Application Developer supports three web service provider runtime environments:

• WebSphere runtime environment

  This is the recommended runtime environment for production use. Only the WebSphere runtime environment is full supported by IBM. It includes specialized serializers and deserializers for complex objects, JSR 109 support for enterprise web services (EJBs), and SOAP over JMS support.

• IBM SOAP runtime environment

  This was the only supported runtime environment in previous releases of WebSphere Studio Application Developer (V5 and earlier). It should be used only for backward compatibility. It supports Apache SOAP 2.3. Currently, DB2 web services from SQL statements (DADX files) still require the SOAP runtime.

• Apache Axis 1.0 runtime environment

  This is the third version of the Apache SOAP implementation. Apache Axis evolved from the Apache SOAP implementation (which began as IBM SOAP4J). The Apache Axis runtime is not recommended for WebSphere production environments, but can be used for Apache Tomcat servers.