Before we start with the exciting process of knowing all about
the so called “Next Big Thing” (Web Services) let me just put
to you the way in which this tutorial is organized. This will
give you an overview of how we shall progress on our path.
Section 1. is all about Web Services Foundation. It clarifies
issues about what Web Services actually are and what makes
them “The Next Big Thing”. Also we would familiarize our
selves to some concepts and allied technologies that we would
need in the later studies of Web Services. The discussion about such
concepts and technologies is rather abstract. If you don't follow
certain points, don't panic ! they would get clear to you as you
progress into later sections. None the less I wont advice you to
venture into skipping this section or any of its part. Make a slow,
sincere attempt to grasp Section 1.
Section 2. Most of the concepts nd technologies that we have abstractly
discussed in Section1 would get stuffed with flesh in Section 2. This is
the “hands on” Section where we learn about how to code web services and use
the infrastructure provided by vendors that let you develop Web Services. The
infrastructure that we shall study will be SUN's “Reference Implementation” of
JAX RPC (don't worry if you don't know what that means).
In the first two sections we shall discuss only to a depth that is needed
minimum to write and deploy simple (yet powerful) Web Services. In later
sections (which are still under construction) we intend to add sections that
deal with “under the hood” stuff. That speak in depth about SOAP, WSDL, UDDI
that are corner stones of Web Services. One of my intentions in section 1
and section2 is to just give you the concepts and then go on to create Web
Services without really being exposing you to the learning curves of
technologies like SOAP, WSDL.
Finally we would learn how to modify the default infrastructure so as to
enable more complex and even more powerful Web Services. These include writing
custom serializer and deserializers. Currently the Sun's Reference
Implementation (actually the xrpcc tool) has a bug ( it does not pick up
custom Serailizer/Deserailizer classes) and so this topic has been deferred
with a hope that the next public release where in Sun promises to fix it
will be available by then.
