Summary

Today, you have seen how Web Services provide a future route for many application integration projects. Web Services provide a framework for the integration of internal or external applications using HTTP and XML. You have seen that Web Services provide a better solution for exposing functionality than existing RPC or Web mechanisms, and you have explored the Web Service functionality offered in Java and J2EE.

You used an existing RPC-style Web Service, both directly using SOAP and through a proxy generated from WSDL. You then created your own server and generated WSDL from this. You looked at how to keep state when using a Web Service and examined the issues around exposing J2EE components as Web Services. Finally, you used complex type mapping to enable a Java object to be passed as a parameter to a Web Service.