Before you start
This tutorial provides guidance for using the IBM WebSphere sMash REST to SOAP extension, which enables you to leverage existing SOAP Web services functionality in new Web applications. This tutorial also discusses the WebSphere sMash Zero Resource Model (ZRM), and demonstrates pre-built Dojo widgets that are delivered with the WebSphere sMash product.
This tutorial walks you through the process of building a sample widget that pulls stock prices for specified companies. The widget will communicate RESTfully with a WebSphere sMash application script written in PHP. The result of this communication will be the integration of data stored in a relational database, and data retrieved from a SOAP Web service application hosted on IBM WebSphere Application Sever. The end result will be a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays company names, their stock symbols, and stock prices. The interface will let users add companies of interest to display and remove those that are no longer needed.
Through this exercise, you will learn about the WebSphere sMash REST to SOAP extension, the WebSphere sMash Zero Resource Model, and a subset of the prebuilt Dojo widgets delivered with WebSphere sMash. As part of the tutorial, you will also install a Java™ Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Web service application to the WebSphere Application Server environment.
This tutorial is intended for Web application developers, and assumes a general knowledge of Web application technologies, such as HTML, Java, and JavaScript™. It is helpful if you understand both REST and SOAP Web services concepts, but expertise in either area is not required. Familiarity with WebSphere sMash is also helpful, but not mandatory.
To follow this tutorial, you need access to both a WebSphere sMash (V1.1.1) and WebSphere Application Server (V6.1 or V7.0) installation. You can download both WebSphere sMash Developer's Edition and WebSphere Application Server for Developers for free (see Resources). For the WebSphere Application Server, you will need to create a default application server profile that can host a Web service application.
As an alternative to installing WebSphere sMash and WebSphere Application Server on your own machine, you can leverage the Amazon Machine Images for each of these products and host instances on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). You can get started with these products (and more) on Amazon EC2 by visiting the developerWorks Cloud Computing Resource Center.
Regardless of whether you install the software locally or leverage them on Amazon EC2, the steps in this tutorial will be the same.
If you already have WebSphere sMash and WebSphere Application Server already installed, this tutorial will take approximately 2 hours to complete.


