WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Implementing Clients

Web service clients can be built on any platform in any language, so long as they adhere to the existing standards for invoking web services. In this section, we look at how to use WebLogic’s JAX-RPC implementation to build Java clients that can invoke a web service. WebLogic lets you generate a web service-specific client JAR that can be used by clients to statically invoke the operations of the web service. In addition, WebLogic allows you to build standard JAX-RPC clients that can discover and invoke web service operations dynamically. Finally, WebLogic provides client-side libraries that let you invoke web services over SSL and build J2ME clients over the CDC profile.

Because WebLogic’s web services implementation conforms to all of the existing standards in the world of web services, clients we construct in this section are capable of interacting with any web service, not only those hosted by WebLogic. The JAX-RPC standard provides several ways to implement a web service client. For instance, the web service client can use a statically generated stub that acts as a proxy for the remote service. Such clients also are called static because the client is aware of the operations exposed by the web service. Alternatively, a client can invoke operations through a dynamic proxy generated at runtime using the WSDL for the web service. Such clients are called dynamic because the client needs to dynamically discover the operations exposed by the web service and ...