JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide

Chapter 10. Web Services

JAW Motors has a fully functional, secure J2EE-based web site and the business is doing well. Harry Schmidlap, the company President, now wants to expand JAW Motors’ business beyond the web site and boost sales by displaying its inventory on other related web sites. Another company, Virtual Big Auto Dealership (VBAD), has a high-traffic web site that consolidates the inventory of many auto dealerships. Thousands of customers use VBAD’s service to find and purchase cars. Mr. Schmidlap views VBAD as an ideal trading partner due to the sheer volume of potential new customers they could bring to JAW Motors.

One problem currently prevents JAW Motors from sharing its inventory—VBAD doesn’t use J2EE. So none of the technologies we’ve shown so far will enable JAW Motors and VBAD to communicate. But VBAD has an experienced IS staff and knows how to use Web Services. Mr. Schmidlap has instructed Gunther Toady (with apologies to the restaurant chain and the cast of “Car 54, Where are You?”), the JAW Motors CTO, to look into Web Services and report back to the Board of Directors within two weeks with his results and findings.

This chapter shows how to deploy a portion of the JAW Motors application as a Web Service so it can work with non-Java clients. We’ll show how to expose an EJB as a Web Service by using XDoclet and Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP) to deploy it on JBoss. We’ll finish by writing an Axis client that uses/consumes our Web Service.

Although we’re ...