Java Web Services: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

What’s Changed in the Second Edition?

In the four years or so since the first edition, there has been continuity as well as change. Web services remain a popular and arguably even dominant approach toward distributed software systems—that is, systems that require the interaction of software on physically distinct devices. The Web itself is a prime example of a distributed system, and the current trend is to blur the distinction between traditional, HTML-centric websites and modern web services, which typically deliver XML or JSON payloads instead of HTML ones. Web services are an appealing way to create distributed systems because these services can piggyback on existing infrastructure such as HTTP(S) transport, web servers, database systems, modern programming languages of various stripes, widespread software libraries for JSON and XML processing, security providers, and so on. Indeed, web services are a lightweight and flexible way to integrate divergent software systems and to make the functionality of such systems readily accessible.

Java remains a major player in web services, and Java support for these services, in the form of standard and third-party software libraries and utilities, continues to improve. Yet two important and related shifts in emphasis have occurred since this book was first published:

• The consumers or clients of web services are increasingly written in JavaScript, particularly in the jQuery dialect, and these clients naturally prefer response payloads in ...