Java Web Services: Up and Running

Chapter 6. JAX-WS in Java Application Servers

Overview of a Java Application Server

In previous chapters, SOAP-based and REST-style web services have been deployed using mostly the Endpoint publisher or the Tomcat web container. This chapter illustrates how web services can be deployed using a Java Application Server (JAS), the software centerpiece of enterprise Java. The current version of enterprise Java is Java EE 5, which includes EJB 3.0. To begin, here is a sketch of the software bundled into a JAS:

Web container

A web container deploys servlets and web services. A traditional web application in Java is a mix of static HTML pages, servlets, higher-level servlet generators such as JSP (Java Server Pages) and JSF (Java Server Faces) scripts, backend JavaBeans for JSP and JSF scripts, and utility classes. Tomcat is the reference implementation (RI) for a web container. Tomcat, like other web containers, can be embedded in an application server. Web components are deployed in the web container as WAR files, which typically contain the standard configuration document web.xml and may contain vendor-specific configuration documents as well (e.g., sun-jaxws.xml). To host web services, a web container relies on a servlet interceptor (in the case of Tomcat, a WSServlet instance) that mediates between the client and the web service SIB.

Message-oriented middleware

The message-oriented middleware supports JMS (Java Message Service), which provides the store-and-forward technologies lumped ...