Customer Reviews

Developing Web Services for Web Applications

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Web Services are an extremely promising new field, and IBM has been building out its WebSphere to handle these. A big problem with Web Services is the mass of documentation and the amount of boilerplate coding you need to do, in order to even have a simple Service. A daunting obstacle to anyone wanting to learn what Web Services are about.

What this book does is show how WebSphere can handle a lot of that behind the scenes boilerplate, and lets you focus on actually building [and debugging] the guts of a Web Service. By the way, the "Rational" programs described in the book are a renaming of earlier functionality build within WebSphere. Personally, I would just lump Rational back into WebSphere.

The book has the foresight to quickly start with a very simple example of a stock quote program. The raw data comes from a Yahoo site. Your Web Service sends a query with symbols of companies, and Yahoo returns a string with the prices, and elementary parsing extracts these. The book shows how WebSphere wraps your code, so that it can now answer a query from another remote application. Naturally, the text then goes on to describe how to make that application, with its requisite proxy code.

Some of you may have programmed client-server code in C or C++, using Remote Procedure Calls. There, utility programs like rpcgen would make the necessary proxy stubs for marshalling and unmarshalling the queries and replies. You should clearly understand that Web Services have moved away from that tightly coupled mechanism, and they use XML for data transfer. But at one level, you can simply and correctly regard what WebSphere does for you in such things as making the proxy code to be a much more elaborate, but equivalent, analog of rpcgen.

Others of you will have used WebSphere, or other JSP/Servlet containers, to make those types of applications, where the container would autogenerate various source code files and compile them. So what the book describes WebSphere doing for Web Services is a small conceptual step from work you have already done with WebSphere.

The book then goes into much more detail, by building out that example Web Service. Like how to detect and cope with Web Service errors. Or test a Service. Or tie the Service to a database. (Surprise, it's DB2!) All important. But, more broadly, you get an understanding of how WebSphere acts as the Web Service container. A major help to you.

The virtue of the book is that it demystifies Web Services, and shows how WebSphere can put this within your programming scope.

I was browsing the book store and saw this book and I bought it immediately. Mainly because it is very practical and makes it very simple to learn about Web Services. I realized that I must atleast know about Web Services from the perspective of a Web Developer.

Congratulations to the author for coming out with such an excellent book. This book really has made learning about Web Services fun. I have completed only the first chapter and I feel that it is worth every penny I spent on this book.

This is refreshing because IBM redbooks are very boring with lot of theory and not enough practical examples. This book takes a different approach and does a very good job.

The first jsp page needs a try catch statement which the author did not mention. I hope there are no technical mistakes in other chapters. I will post an update to my review after I finish it.

I'm obviously in the middle on this book. I'm sure it's value was much higher when it was initially introduced, and the referenced IBM Websites in the book actually existed. I'd say the book is well written, with good step-by-step attention to detail. Chapters 1-3 were easy to follow and reproduce, except for the fact that I couldn't get the IBM UDDI Test Registry piece to work. Chapter 4 was OK. Things went south starting in Chap 5, and continued to worsen so that by the end of Chapter 7, I decided to stop trying to work the examples. I have to agree with one reviewer about the lack of published errata. I think overall the authors did an excellent job in the actual writing, but could have done the purchasers of the book and themselves a considerable service by doing what the best authors do: create\update an errata page. My summary opinion is that I think the book probably does a good job of giving you a good fundamental knowledge base, but that the payoff is in reading the book..not actually trying\expecting to get the examples to work.

I had reviewed this book earlier after I had finished the first chapter. After working through the second chapter and going back and forth with the author of the book I have decided to sell this book on Amazon.

The reason that is book is not that great is:

1. No Errata
2. No CD that has evaluation version of the Software

It is very frustrating when you encounter an error in the book and you send an email to the author and wait for a week for the response. I realize they have a life but if the author cannot even prepare an errata for the book and post it on the publisher's website or their blog then I don't think anyone should be spending their hard-earned money on this book.

It is better to do a search on google for RAD webservices tutorial. IBM site has some tutorials with videos that you can watch that walks you through the steps of creating web services.

The instructions shown on this book will work only on RAD 6.0.1. By the way it is impossible to upgrade RAD 6.0 to RAD 6.0.1 version. I have tried network installation, local installation and galaxy installation. Nothing works. For a book like this, it is very important that the tool is provided as part of the CD.

The CD that comes along with the book contains only code examples. Who needs the code examples when the RAD updater takes two days to download the zip file required to upgrade? I used T1 line believe me.

I have suffered due to this book. I hope this review helps others to avoid misery. God bless.