Assembling web services applications

You can assemble Java-based web services applications using assembly tools.

Before you begin

You can assemble Java-based web services modules with assembly tools provided with the application server.

About this task

After you develop your web service application, you are now ready to assemble the application. Assembling a web service application consists of creating the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) modules that you can deploy onto application servers. The modules are created from code artifacts such as web application archives (WAR) files for JavaBeans applications or enterprise beans Java archive (JAR) files for enterprise beans applications. This packaging and configuring of code artifacts into enterprise application modules (EAR files) or standalone web modules is necessary for deploying the modules onto an application server.

Procedure

Start an assembly tool.
Read about starting the assembly tool in the Rational® Application Developer documentation.
Assemble your web services enabled bean into the appropriate module.
- For JavaBeans enabled as web services:
  1. Assembling a WAR file that is enabled for web services from Java code.
  2. Assembling a web services-enabled WAR file from a WSDL file.
- For enterprise beans enabled as web services:
  1. Assembling a JAR file that is enabled for web services from an enterprise bean.
  2. Assembling a web services-enabled enterprise bean JAR file from a WSDL file.
  Avoid trouble: This product supports packaging enterprise beans in WAR files. If you include a web services-enabled enterprise bean JAR file into a WAR file, you must merge any information in the webservices.xml deployment descriptor files that are in the JAR files into the webservices.xml deployment descriptor in the WEB-INF directory of the WAR file. To learn more, see the EJB content in WAR modules information.
  
  Best practice: When developing faults for a JAX-WS application, it is a best practice to always include the fault bean that is generated by the JAX-WS tooling in the packaging of your JAX-WS application. However if your application does not use the fault bean classes that are generated by the JAX-WS tooling (that is, you use a bottom-up development approach starting from Java and you choose not to package the fault bean classes), the application server runtime environment dynamically generates the fault beans. Even so, it is a best practice to always package the fault bean.
Assemble the web services enabled module into an enterprise archive (EAR) file.
- Assembling a web services-enabled WAR into an EAR file.
- Assembling an enterprise bean JAR file into an EAR file.
Enable the EAR file for EJB modules that contain web services.
When the EAR file contains Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) modules that contain web services, you must run the endptEnabler command-line tool or an assembly tool before deployment to produce a web services endpoint WAR file. This tool is also used to specify whether the web services are exposed using SOAP over Java Message Service (JMS) or SOAP over HTTP.
Assemble a web services-enabled WAR file into an EAR file.

Results

You have a web services-enabled EAR file that you can deploy onto the application server.

What to do next

Now you need to deploy the web services-enabled EAR file onto your application server. To learn more, read about deploying web services applications onto application servers