Product Description

The Web services architecture offers a new way to think about and implement application-to-application integration and interoperability that makes the development platform irrelevant. Two applications, regardless of operating system, programming language, or any other technical implementation detail, communicate using XML messages over open Internet protocols such as HTTP or SMTP. The Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) is a specification that details how to encode that information and has become the messaging protocol of choice for Web services. This is a detailed guide to using SOAP and other Web services standards - WSDL (Web Service Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration protocol). It covers the concepts of the Web services architecture and offers practical advice on building and deploying Web services in the enterprise. It decodes the standards, explaining the concepts and implementation in a clear, concise style. You'll also learn about the major toolkits for building and deploying Web services. Examples in Java, Perl, C#, and Visual Basic illustrate the principles. Significant applications developed using Java and Perl on the Apache Tomcat Web platform address real issues such as security, debugging, and interoperability.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266843 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Programming Web Services with SOAP shows how to build distributed applications using XML Web services. The authors explain what SOAP is, and how it is implemented in Java with Apache SOAP, in Perl with SOAP::Lite, and on Microsoft's.NET Framework. They also present a snapshot of what is happening with Web services, with shrewd comments about standards, implementations and industry battlegrounds. The book is realistic about areas of weakness in the SOAP specification, highlighting problem areas such as incompatibilities and lack of security standards. James Snell and Doug Tidwell work on SOAP and related technologies at IBM, while Pavel Kulchenko is the author of SOAP::Lite, so this is a particularly well-informed team. Perhaps inevitably, they cover Java and Perl implementations in more detail than .Net, which means this may not be the best title for developers intending to work primarily with Microsoft's platform.

The early chapters offer an introductory overview, describing the SOAP specification and giving simple examples in Perl, Java and .Net. Next comes a more complex example, using a Perl server and an Apache SOAP client. There is a chapter on describing Web services with WSDL, and another on discovering Web services with the UDDI registry or the more recent WS-Inspection language. The authors then give a real-world example, explaining the CodeShare Service Network, an open source project for sharing code. Finally, there is a look at security and a peek into the future of SOAP. In the end SOAP is software plumbing, as the authors readily admit, and makes a rather dry topic. Even so, it is an essential part of Web development today and this short, clear presentation does a great job of showing how to put it to work. --Tim Anderson

From the Publisher
Programming Web Services with SOAP introduces you to building distributed Web-based applications using the SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI protocols. You'll learn the XML underlying these standards, as well as how to use the popular toolkits for Java and Perl. The book also addresses security and other enterprise issues

About the Author
James Snell is a member of IBM's emerging software technologies team where his work is dedicated to the evolving Web services architecture.

Doug Tidwell is a senior programmer at IBM. He has more than a sixth of a century of programming experience, and has been working with markup languages for more than a decade. He was a speaker at the first XML conference in 1997, and has taught XML classes around the world. His job as a Cyber Evangelist is to look busy and to help people use new technologies to solve problems. Using a pair of zircon-encrusted tweezers, he holds a master's degree in computer science from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Georgia. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, cooking teacher Sheri Castle (see her web site at http://www.sheri-inc.com) and their daughter Lily.

Customer Reviews

Too many errors
I have just spent about a week trying to get the "Hello, world" examples to work. Three problems:
1) The examples are full of errors. If you buy this book, check the "errata" page for the book on O'Reilly's web site before you try to test the examples.
2) There is very little explanation of how the examples are supposed to work. Therefore, if they don't work "off the shelf" - and they don't - then it makes it quite hard to get them running.
3) There isn't enough background (from my point of view, anyway) on the underlying technologies and how they interract to deliver SOAP, e.g. Web Servers, CGI, HTTP daemon, Perl, VBScript etc.

I am an experienced C++ programmer, but I am new to Web programming. If you are more familiar than me with Apache, IIS, CGI, Perl, VBS etc, OR if you are more of a manager type looking for an overview of the technology without wanting to get into the nitty-gritty of the examples, then perhaps your mileage with this book will differ from mine.

But I really can't recommend it.

Woefully out of date
Unsurprisingly, this book has become out of date as Web Services technology has advanced. As such, the majority of discussion on WS platforms are misleading.

nicely written and illustrated introduction to SOAP/WSDL
This book covers relatively uninteresting technology, but it is well illustrated and clear within it's scope.

I guess what I missed is what I find most confusing: the overlap of J2EE and web services, and up to date deployment details. There's no information on invoking EJB session bean methods for example. The Apache Axis implementation coverage is necessarily sparse, and I guess implementation/deployment details for most platforms will change frequently. Coming from a Java background, I really appreciated the language neutral tone of the book. If ever there was a book designed for frequent web updates (I read it on Safari), it's this one.