Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies

8.4. Web Service Communication Patterns

Up to now we have concentrated on Web service interactions between two entities. Let's take a look at the bigger picture and see how Web service interactions operate within a larger business collaboration. Often Web service interactions are part of larger business collaborations that may involve multiple synchronous and asynchronous Web service interactions. Although Web service interactions within a single business collaboration may be related, current Web service technologies treat these interactions as stateless. As a result, a developer needs a way to associate messages that are part of a single business collaboration. This issue is made more difficult because collaboration sometimes requires that messages ...