Planning to use web services

You can plan to develop and implement web services based on a variety of Java™ programming models.

Before you begin

Web services reflect the service-oriented architecture approach to programming. This approach is based on the idea of building applications by discovering and implementing network-available services, or by invoking the available applications to accomplish a task. Web services deliver interoperability, for example, web services applications provide a way for components created in different programming languages to work together as if they were created using the same language. Web services rely on existing transport technologies, such as HTTP, and standard data encoding techniques, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), for invoking the implementation.

Best practices: IBM® WebSphere® Application Server supports the Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) programming model and the Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) programming model. JAX-WS is a web services programming model that extends the foundation provided by the JAX-RPC programming model. The JAX-WS programming model simplifies development of web services and clients through support of a standards-based annotations model. Although the JAX-RPC programming model and applications are still supported, take advantage of the easy-to-implement JAX-WS programming model to develop new web services applications and clients.

[z/OS][AIX Solaris HP-UX Linux Windows]Read the web services scenario overview information to learn about the story of a fictional online garden supply retailer named Plants by WebSphere and how this retailer incorporated the web services concept. You can also review the Samples section of the Information Center for web services samples. These samples demonstrate enterprise beans and JavaBeans components that are available as web services.

The JAX-WS Web services samples demonstrate the simple message exchange patterns using both synchronous and asynchronous invocation of web services in SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 environments. The samples are composed with web service standards such as WS-Addressing (WS-A) , WS-Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), and WS-Secure Conversation (WS-SC), which you can use to complete a broad range of interoperability tests. The samples demonstrate the use of JavaBeans artifacts and static service endpoints and proxy-based clients. Additionally, a sample is provided that demonstrates Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM).

About this task

You must re-write existing JAX-RPC applications if you want to take advantage of the features of the JAX-WS programming model.

Procedure

  1. Identify your goals and design web services to fit your e-business solution.
    Consider what you want to accomplish by using web services. Decide how web services fit into your current topology, applications and programming model. Determine how the Web services process requests on the server and how the clients manage and use the web service.
  2. Design your web services for reliability, availability, manageability and security.
    For example, you want your web services to process a transaction in a reasonable time at all hours of the day and provide users with optimal security, such as authentication for buyers. Planning to use web services to work with WebSphere Application Server helps to meet these requirements.
  3. Review the standards used in developing and deploying web services onto WebSphere Application Server. Development and deployment are based on a variety of Java programming models.
  4. Decide what development and implementation tools to use.
    You can use a variety of manual development and implementation tasks. Whether you have an existing web service to implement or you want to develop your own from a JavaBeans implementation or from an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) module, you can choose different tasks respective to your resources. You can also use assembly tools to complete development and implementation tasks.
  5. Install the application server.
    For detailed information on installing the application server, read about installing your application serving environment.
  6. Review web services samples.

Results

You have a design plan for implementing web services applications into your business architecture.