Web Services Tutorials and Links

Web services Activity:
The World Wide Web is more and more used for application to application communication. The programmatic interfaces made available are referred to as Web services. The goal of the Web Services Activity is to develop a set of technologies in order to lead Web services to their full potential. The Web Services Activity Statement explains the W3C's work on this topic in more detail.
Web Services Addressing:
Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core (WS-Addressing) defines two constructs, message addressing properties and endpoint references, that normalize the information typically provided by transport protocols and messaging systems in a way that is independent of any particular transport or messaging system. A Web service endpoint is a (referenceable) entity, processor, or resource to which Web service messages can be addressed. Endpoint references convey the information needed to address a Web service endpoint. This specification defines a family of message addressing properties that convey end-to-end message characteristics including references for source and destination endpoints and message identity that allows uniform addressing of messages independent of the underlying transport.
Web Services Description Language:
As communications protocols and message formats are standardized in the web community, it becomes increasingly possible and important to be able to describe the communications in some structured way. WSDL addresses this need by defining an XML grammar for describing network services as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages. WSDL service definitions provide documentation for distributed systems and serve as a recipe for automating the details involved in applications communication. A WSDL document defines services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. In WSDL, the abstract definition of endpoints and messages is separated from their concrete network deployment or data format bindings.
Java Web services:
The Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP) is a free integrated toolkit you can use to build, test and deploy XML applications, Web services, and Web applications with the latest Web service technologies and standards implementations. With the newest release of the Java WSDP 2.0, developers will be able to:
Develop and deploy using the latest XML and Web services technologies slated for inclusion into Sun's deployment platforms.
Enhance Web services performance without revising WSDL files or application code with the refreshed Fast Infoset features from Java WSDP 1.6.
Create XML and Web service-enabled applications that exploit the enhanced security features with enhanced XWSS features.
Continue to enjoy Java interoperability and portability across different platforms and devices.
Simplify and lower the cost of legacy application integration, data interchange, and publishing in a Web environment.
Web Services Architect:
In this article, we have tried to keep a realistic, pragmatic, and balanced approach in determining the return on investment on Web Services. It is worth mentioning that, no matter how promising a new technology is, promoting and encouraging its usage through such articles and papers is not justified until there is a solid business case for its adoption. It is fundamentally important for us to warn about the pitfalls as and where we foresee them, leaving the final decision up to the readers who range from senior management (technical and business), through business analysts, and systems architects, to project managers, and software developers.
Web Services primer:
Looking back over the last six years, it is hard to imagine networked computing without the Web. The reason why the Web succeeded where earlier hypertext schemes failed can be traced to a couple of basic factors: simplicity and ubiquity. From a service provider's (e.g. an e-shop) point of view, if they can set up a web site they can join the global community. From a client's point of view, if you can type, you can access services. From a service API point of view, the majority of the web's work is done by 3 methods (GET, POST, and PUT) and a simple markup language. The web services movement is about the fact that the advantages of the Web as a platform apply not only to information but to services.
Web services-Axis:
Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") submission to W3C.
From the draft W3C specification:
SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.
This project is a follow-on to the Apache SOAP project.
Please see the Reference Library for a list of technical resources that should prove useful.
Getting a Java Web service to work:
We're deploying an existing Web service application to a new JBoss server by following the "Getting Started with JBoss" manual from www.jboss.org, but the j2eetutorial examples file doesn't seem to match the documentation. The application is ready for deployment, but we can't seem to get the right files in the right places to make things work. Where can we find a JBoss example that works, or some tools to automate the deployment?
The manual is written for JBoss Version 3.2.3 and Version 1.3.X of the Java Software Development Kit (JSDK). The current production JBoss release is 3.2.4, and using Version 1.4X of the JSDK is recommended.
Web Services ToolKit:
A software development environment for designing, developing, and executing Web service technologies.WSTK has evolved into the ETTK for Web Services and Autonomic Computing (ETTK-WS).
The Emerging technologies team is expanding the scope of the toolkit to include autonomic and grid-related technologies and has therefore rebranded this technology to "ETTK for Web Services and Autonomic Computing" (ETTK-WS) in order to more accurately reflect its role in the new ETTK collection of technologies and prototypes. The ETTK-WS will continue to offer leading-edge prototyping of emerging Web services technologies for recently released specifications. The ETTK-WS can be downloaded here at alphaWorks. The ETTK-WS integrates emerging technologies from IBM Research Labs and IBM Software Groups into a consolidated package to showcase leading-edge technologies that may or may not make it into IBM products.
Internet Web Services:
Web services are the basis of distributed computing across the Internet. A Web service consumer locates a Web service and invokes the operations it provides. The Web service provider (the application implementing the Web service) can be on the same Java virtual machine as the one using it, or it can be thousands of miles away. Web services use standard Web protocols such as XML, SOAP, and HTTP.
What is Web Services resource:
Many technologies must represent state in a standard fashion in a Web services architecture, such as grid computing and distributed systems management. WSRF is the emerging OASIS Web services standard for modeling and accessing stateful resources using Web services.
WSRF for WAS was developed by the WebSphere Application Server (WAS) development team. This technology extends the WAS Web Services run-time environment to support the patterns defined by WSRF, and it enables a Web service to have an association with instances of stateful resources, the composite of which is a stateful "WS-Resource." A WS-Resource has an associated XML document, called a resource properties document, that describes the state of the resource. The resource properties document and the resource it describes may be queried and updated through Web service message exchanges defined in the WSRF specifications.
This technology includes a comprehensive sample application illustrating the following:
the use of a stateful WS-Resource
the means through which its state is queried and updated
the well-defined life cycle of the state.
Web Services Language:
As expressed in the Statement of Mission and Objectives, the SWSI Language Committee aims to develop computer language technology that will provide a firm, long-term foundation for the future of Web services on the Internet. It is desired that this foundation will support the most general approaches to service deployment and use that are currently technically feasible.
The Committee seeks to develop a formal language that allows for rich declarative specification of a wide variety of information about Web services, which will support automation of a broad spectrum of activities related to Web services, such as discovery, selection, composition, negotiation and contracting, invocation, monitoring of progress, and recovery from failure.
The committee aims to build on the success of OWL-S, taking the existing language as a starting point, while allowing scope for the revisions and additions necessary to address these new requirements.
WSDL Editor:
The XMLSpy WSDL editor allows you to create, edit, visualize, and validate any WSDL file. WSDL is a language for describing Web services and is ideally suited as an interface definition language (IDL) for architecting Web services applications. By first building an interface, client and server programmers can implement their respective programming contract using any language or operating system, avoiding interoperability problems. XMLSpy helps you write and validate WSDL documents quickly and easily. The graphical WSDL editor displays the WSDL file structure as well as the WSDL elements grouped by operations, portTypes, bindings, and services. You can manipulate the file by dragging and dropping elements, and context-sensitive windows and entry helpers provide intelligent editing options.
Feature of WSDL Editor:
The WSDL Editor offers a rich set of features for programmers looking to create and edit Web Services:
Intuitive graphical environment for viewing and editing WSDL files
Web Services creation wizard that automates the creation of service definitions, port types, binding, template operations, and messages
Fully automated wizards for creating and editing XML schema, schema array, complex types, simple types, and enumerations
Support for WSDL validation, where WSDL is tested against WSDL Schema
Support for WSDL profiling, so WSDL can be validated against customized profiles for specific requirements such as standards compatibility (for example, WS-I)
Support for advanced WSDL capabilities such as imports, faults, SOAP headers, multiple bindings, and parameter ordering
WSDL 1.1 specification support
Retrieval of WSDL from across networks, UDDI repositories, or Internet locations
Full support for WSDL documentation
Web Services Editor:
Cape Clear Software has debuted a free service-oriented architecture (SOA) editor. It ?provides programmers with a graphical environment that simplifies the creation of standards-based Web Services, which can be deployed into an SOA-based architecture,? Cape Clear says. The SOA Editor offers easy-to-use tools for building services, including automated wizards for common development tasks, support for Web Services standards, tools for testing code, support for XML Schema, and detailed documentation to help programmers get up and running quickly,? the vendor notes. ?The SOA Editor is available for download immediately.
X standard version:
XStandard is the leading standards-compliant plug-in WYSIWYG editor for Windows desktop applications and browser-based content management systems (IE/Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape). The editor generates clean XHTML Strict or 1.1, uses CSS for formatting, and ensures the clean separation of content from presentation. Markup generated by XStandard meets the most demanding accessibility requirements. The editor's cool features include drag & drop file upload, spell checking and an image library that integrates tightly with your CMS.
XML-Editor:
XML editor is a Java-based XML editor with support for XML, XSL, TXT, XSD and DTD documents. Oxygen shows that Java should be the base of an XML editor; this can be proved by the development dynamics of Oxygen and by the availability on many platforms. It has Unicode support and the interface messages are translated in English, French, German, Italian and Romanian. The main goal of Oxygen is to be a tool easy to use and to make tasks shorter, thus it offers end tag auto-completion and a powerful code insight that guide the user to write valid XML content. The code insight can follow a DTD structure, an XML schema structure or even can detect the structure of a partial edited document allowing the rest of the document to be created about 5 times faster than before. A very important thing is manipulating XML content and XSLT is the normal way to this, thus XML and XSL documents can be easily associated one with the other and the transformation results can be viewed through different views like text, XML, HTML. An XPath console is present to assist the user in testing the results of XPath expressions.
Web services with Axis2:
In simple terms, Axis2 is not just the next version of the Axis 1.x family; rather, it is a revolutionary version of Axis 1.x. Axis2 is no longer bound to request-response Web service invocation. As in the Axis 1.x family, there is no turning point like the "pivot point" in Axis2, and Axis2 is built totally on keeping asynchronous Web service invocation in mind. Axis2 acts as a pipe that carries the SOAP message from one end to other. The entry point to the pipe is a transport receiver, and the end point is a message receiver. After handing over the message to the message receiver, Axis2 does not care about the message. Therefore, it's up to the message receiver to invoke the service and send the response, if any, so service implementation classes) need not always be a Java class; it can be something else as well.
Secure Web Services via Oriented:
This article describes the exploitation of the pluggable transport infrastructure provided as part of ASP.NET Web Services, which allows developers to deliver Soap messages built in the document/literal format to be delivered to an end point via mechanisms other than default HTTP transport. In this article, a framework that supports the addition of alternative physical delivery mechanisms is presented, and two such implementations are included ? MSMQ and Websphere MQ are chosen to illustrate a store-forward capability for a more 'guaranteed' Web Services request delivery. The framework that will be developed integrates the Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 1.0 for secure 2-way transport of messages over non-HTTP mechanisms, thereby giving the developer a choice of 'trusted' (clear message) or 'untrusted' (secure message) delivery to the chosen endpoint.
Microsoft Web Services:
The Microsoft.com Web service is an XML Web service that will enable you to integrate information and services from MSDN, Technet, other Microsoft.com sites, and Microsoft Support. In order to serve as a test for our new architecture, Version 1.0 of the Microsoft.com Web service is limited to providing information about top downloads from Microsoft.com. Future releases will build on this architecture to provide access to a broader variety of Microsoft content and services.
Web Services to J2EE :
The Java XML Pack is the first certified release of Web services tools for J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition), the server software platform that is based on the Java programming language. Java developers already have some tools provided by the open-source community that allow them to build XML-based Web services for J2EE, said Karen Shipe, a product manager with Sun's Java XML group. But Sun's release Monday is the first such technology that has gone through the Java certification process.
Open SAML Web Services:
OpenSAML is a set of open-source libraries in Java and C++ which can be used to build, transport, and parse SAML messages. OpenSAML is able to store the individual information fields that make up a SAML message, build the correct XML representation, and parse XML back into the individual fields before handing it off to a recipient. OpenSAML supports the SOAP binding for the exchange of SAML request and response objects (C++ supports requesting only). It provides additional help in supporting the SAML browser/POST profile for web single sign-on. It does not currently provide any additional support for the artifact profile, but provides the machinery needed to implement it in other software. All core SAML constructs are now supported to some degree.OpenSAML has been produced by Internet2 members as part of their work on the Shibboleth project ( http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ )