Programming Web Services with SOAP

Preface

You'd be hard-pressed to find a buzzword hotter than web services . Breathless articles promise that web services will revolutionize business, open new markets, and change the way the world works. Proponents call web services "The Third-Generation Internet," putting them on a par with email and the browseable web. And no protocol for implementing web services has received more attention than SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol.

This book will give you perspective to make sense of all the hype. When you finish this book, you will come away understanding three things: what web services are, how they are written with SOAP, and how to use other technologies with SOAP to build web services for the enterprise.

While this book is primarily a technical resource for software developers, its overview of the relevant technologies, development models, standardization efforts, and architectural fundamentals can be easily grasped by a nontechnical audience wishing to gain a better understanding of this emerging set of new technologies.

For the technical audience, this book has several things to offer:

• A detailed walk-through of the SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and related specifications

• Source code and commentary for sample web services

• Insights on how to address issues such as security and reliability in enterprise environments

Web services represent a powerful new way to build software systems from distributed components. But because many of the technologies are immature or only address parts ...