Beginning Spring Framework 2

Chapter 10. Web Service Consumer and Interoperation with .NET

Web services technology enables computer systems to communicate over the Internet. Communication is performed over the universal standard HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol. Because HTTP is the same protocol that web browsers use to communicate with web servers, Web service consumers (clients) enjoy the same ubiquitous connections to Web service providers anywhere in the world.

The preceding chapter revealed how the Spring framework can be used to rapidly build Web services. These Web services can expose system features for network-wide consumption by Web service consumers. The main focus of this chapter is on the construction of Web service consumers. With Spring and XFire, Java-based Web service consumers can be created easily.

Chapter 9 showed you how to create a Web service consumer (in the form of a unit test) for Web services that you create in Java. This chapter shows you how to create consumers for Web services created by means of .NET-based technology. The very same techniques shown here can also be used to consume Web services that are created using any other programming language and platforms.

Specifically, this chapter shows the creation of a Spring-based Web service client for an e-mail validation Web service. The e-mail validation service itself is implemented by means of C# running on Microsoft's .NET framework. As part of the PIX application's user-registration process, the e-mail validation Web ...