Developing SOAP web services

Before you begin

Before you begin to create a SOAP web service, perform these tasks:

1. Configure your CICS system to support web services; see Configuring your CICS system for web services.
2. Create the necessary infrastructure to support the deployment of your web services; see Creating the web services infrastructure.
3. Decide whether you want to use the web services assistant; see Planning to use SOAP web services.

You must have fundamental knowledge about how CICS supports web services.

Procedure

1. Create a SOAP web service in one of four ways:
   • Use the CICS web services assistant to create the web service description or language structures and deploy them into CICS. Use the PIPELINE SCAN command to automatically create the required CICS resources.

     The CICS web services assistant is a supplied utility that helps you to create the necessary artifacts for a SOAP web service provider or a service requester application, or to enable an existing application as a web service provider. The assistant can create a WSDL document from a simple language structure or a language structure from an existing WSDL document; it supports COBOL, C/C++, and PL/I. It also generates information that is used to enable automatic runtime conversion of the SOAP messages to containers and COMMAREAs, and vice versa. This information is used by the CICS web services support during pipeline processing.

     Follow the instruction in the following topics:

     • Creating a web service provider by using the web services assistant
     • Creating a web service requester using the web services assistant
   • Use IBM® Developer for z/OS or the Java™ API to create the web service description or language structures and deploy them into CICS. Use the PIPELINE SCAN command to automatically create the required CICS resources. For details, see Developing web services using tooling.
   • Create or change an application program to handle the XML in the inbound and outbound messages, including the data conversion, and populate the correct containers in the pipeline. You must create the required CICS resources manually. For more information, see Creating your own XML-aware web service applications.
   • Deploy an Axis2 application as a web service. For details, see Using Java with web services.
2. Start the web service to test that it works as you intended.

   If you are using the web services assistant to deploy your web service, you can use the SET WEBSERVICE command to turn on validation. This validation checks that the data is converted correctly.