Java and XML, Second Edition

Putting It All Together

With that fairly basic understanding of WSDL added to the UDDI discussion, you’re ready for a complete web services example. In this section, I detail the process of writing a SOAP service (a messaging one, this time), registering it with a UDDI registry, finding it using UDDI, getting the WSDL descriptor, and then interacting with the service via a client.

For the example, I add a little more complexity. Here’s the scenario. CDs-R-Us is a new company that wants to provide CDs to distributors around the world. Since they are (noticeable) late to market, they seek to gain business by providing a high-tech interface, using web services to make interaction easy. They are going to provide the ability to send XML messages requesting CDs through SOAP. Their applications will fulfill these orders by looking up the CD on their catalog server (running, of course, a heavy-duty version of the CDCatalog service from last chapter), and then returning an invoice. There are actually two SOAP transactions going on: one from the client to CDs-R-Us, which is messaging-based, and one internal to CDs-R-Us, which is RPC-based. Figure 13-3 shows the complete process flow. They also want to register their messaging service with a UDDI registry so potential clients can find them.

Figure 13-3. Process flow for the example application

A Messaging Service

Since we’ll be using CDCatalog ...