Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI

Rating:
Summary: Good supplement to other key books on topic
Review: While this is well written and accurate, I found it necessary to purchase two other titles to get full coverage of web services based Java applications. These were Java for the Web with Servlets, JSP, and EJB and J2EE, The Complete Reference.

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Without doubt a excellent book for introducing and building web services with java, but authors forgot to view the conception of web services in the mirror of java web services developer pack of sun, i think this is a reference for develop this technologie. Also, for this moment the axis api has been changed. A cool book, because there are a little bit of books for web services on java and it have a nice(in some moments complicated) vision and understanding of ws.

Rating:
Summary: too heavy?
Review: [A review of the SECOND EDITION, 2004.]

Web Services are this potential hot new field that has been built out with a lot of proposed standards. This book goes through them, with an emphasis on implementing applications in Java. The basic idea is a set of loosely coupled programs, scattered across a computer network, which invariably is the Internet or a private Internet. Loosely coupled means asynchronous, which then favours a nonblocking message passing approach, as opposed to a blocking RPC-type setup. The messages are sent as XML. Which is independent of platform and programming language. So the book shows how to use XML in WS.

But these programs on the network need to find each other. So we have UDDI being explained in the book.

A large part of the book is given over to how to describe a WS. A massive standard syntax has arisen, WSDL, which is expressed in XML. Like any other book on it, this conveys the sheer verbosity of WSDL. The industry bodies that built it tried to make it expressive enough for any plausible (though yet unimplemented) usage. The problem is that WSDL is now complex and hard to learn. It is not the book itself that is bloated, but what it faithfully describes.

One might wonder. Is WSDL too heavy? Could it end up like X.400 and X.500? There are indeed implementations of these, but on only a few websites.