Java and XML, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Content Syndication

In the last two chapters, I tried to give you a “web services” view of the world. In other words, you saw how to write applications that communicated with each other through the various web services technologies like WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP. However, as you also saw, some things in this worldview are still a bit shaky, like WSDL generation and support (providing you’re using open standards like Apache SOAP). Today, you may want to consider other options for business-to-business communication. In this chapter, I present an alternative solution for communicating across businesses to round out your skillset.

In this chapter, I look at using different XML specifications to provide this sort of communication across application and company lines, using some companies invented for the purpose. To begin with, I’ll examine the Foobar Public Library, a library that allows its suppliers to enter online new books being shipped to the library. These books are then added to the library’s data store for later use. Unfortunately, the library is having a hard time finding good Java developers, so it has implemented a Perl-based CGI solution. New books are entered online and then stored by a Perl script. Already, you can see that alternatives to web services would be handy, as finding a good Perl SOAP implementation is not easy (at least not yet!).

I’ll also look at another company, mytechbooks.com. mytechbooks.com sells technical and computing books (such as this one) ...