z/TPF and WebSphere Application Server in a Service Oriented Architecture

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Chapter 7. Web Service consumer

During the previous chapter, we have created a sample Web Service based on the z/TPF

ZDTIM time function. In the current chapter, we now focus on the consumer side by creating a

couple of different client sample implementations that interact with the z/TPF Web Service.

In order to implement the samples, we use some of the IBM SOA products like WebSphere

Application Server and Rational® Application Developer. The WebSphere Application Server

does not ship with a built-in PHP runtime environment, so we use a PHP runtime from Zend

Inc. instead.

7.1 Java Server Page as Web Service consumer

In this section we create a sample Java Server Page that displays the z/TPF system time

upon invocation. Java Server Pages are based on static HTML Web Pages that can contain

specially formatted elements containing Java code. The inserted Java code fragments

provide a powerful way of incorporating dynamic data into a normally static Web Page.

Of course, the entire Web Page could be generated on the fly, but a Web Page created that

way is more complex to maintain and requires much more programming effort and

knowledge. Today there are numerous integrated development environments (IDEs) available

that provide a large selection of graphical tools and wizards, and Web Pages can be

generated in much less time than ever before.

7.1.1 Integrated development environment to choose

As mentioned before, there are numerous IDEs available and choosing the perfect one can

be quite challenging. Most companies standardize their internal development teams on a

single IDE or a family of related IDEs in order to minimize training issues and to simplify the

reuse of development projects.

For the purpose of this book we use the

IBM Rational Application Developer V6.0. IBM

provides a very extensive array of IDEs tailored to specific development requirements. The

open source Eclipse platform builds the common base upon which all IBM IDEs are based.

The more traditional development environments are available under the IBM Rational brand

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