Customer Reviews

J2EE Web Services: XML SOAP WSDL UDDI WS-I JAX-RPC JAXR SAAJ JAXP

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Warning: this book is only a rumination on the J2EE web services specification, fat on "theory" and with absolutely no real code examples you can run and play with to learn. Unless you are someone who can learn playing tennis looking at people playing it, or become a musician by listening to music, I doubt you can become a web services developer by just reading words and code snippets.
As the author says: "this book doesn't attempt to cover installation, configuration, or deployment except in terms of standard J2EE requirements". I do believe that a decent tech book must have running code to support its explanations and support its value and usefulness. With this text Monson-Haefel is well on his way to win the "Most useless java book of the year" award.

J2EE Web Services by Richard Monson-Haefel is the current de-facto standard bible for Web Services development on Java. I had pre-ordered this book on Amazon and have read through this book several times in the last few months and I absolutely love this book. Richard has created a great resource for the J2EE developer that's looking to build interoperable Web Services.

Most EJB developers are already familiar with Richard Monson-Haefel's work in his OReilly EJB's book. He brings that expertise into the realm of J2EE and Web Services. In fact, this is the first book to talk about Web Services Interoperability Organization's (WS-I) Basic Profile 1.0.

WS-I is an open, industry organization chartered to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 is set of recommendations on how to use web services specifications to maximize interoperability. This book delves into the details of J2EE 1.4 and how we as Java developer can build and consume Web Services in a standard way.

The book starts off with an introduction to XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI before jumping into the meat, Java API for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC). If you don't have any experience with those technologies, the book offers a great tutorial on those items. I was particularly impressed with the treatment on XML Schemas in the 3rd chapter.

Once the basic groundwork is laid with a solid introduction to XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, the book jumps right in the JAX-RPC platform. In fact, the middle half of the book is dedicated to JAX-RPC. JAX-RPC is a specification for making remote procedure calls via XML and SOAP over HTTP. JAX-RPC provides an easy to develop programming model for development of SOAP based Web services. You can use the RPC programming model to develop Web service clients and endpoints (server).

Once you get an overview of JAX-RPC, you jump right into building Web Services. The section on JAX-RPC is really detailed and offers a very in-depth tutorial on building Web Services. From JAX-RPC, you jump into Java API for XML Registries or JAXR. The Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) provides a uniform and standard Java API for accessing different kinds of XML Registries. An XML registry is an enabling infrastructure for building, deploying, and discovering Web services. I read through most of this section but I didn't really spend as much time on it as I should have.

The final section of the book deals with deployment. J2EE deployment is a total pain in the ass and anyone that's spent hours fighting classpath issues in ear files will agree with me. The section on deployment is very detailed and very well written. I found it extremely helpful in setting up JAX-RPC mapping files along with other deployment descriptor. I have to agree with Richard's comment at the end of Chapter 24 - Deployment descriptors sucks and have gotten overly complicated. Items like Cedric's ejbc and XDoclet have done a great job in simplified the creation of ejb and web deployment descriptors and J2EE 1.5 should really address this issue.

My only complaint about this book is the lack of downloadable source code. I did email Richard and he very graciously replied saying the book is really more of a reference than a tutorial. Hopefully he'll change his mind and put together a source code distribution for this book.

If you are going to be building Web Services in Java, want to learn more about the alphabet soup of Web Services or just want to learn more about WS-I and BP1 and how to build interoperable Web Services, this is the book for you. I found this book to be very helpful and plan to use it for my Web Services class. This book is a must for any J2EE Web Services developer.

This book takes the reader from first principles, laying a foundation upon which the implications and potential of Web services can be fully understood. Early chapters introduce and explain Web services basics.

Throughout the book the author maintains a vendor neutral perspective. So if you want to read an introductory text on web-services at leisure, this book is a good choice. Its written in a very comprehensible style and I had no problems understanding the key concepts.

If you are seeking to learn the details of web services beyond introductory concepts then this isn't the book for you.

It's been enduring pain when I tested the code examples and it did'nt work on JBoss. The content looks a bit old and needs an update.

There is NOT even one example in this book that can run on the computer. So, how can people learn web services by this book? Who is this book for? Is it for experts of web services? Experts do not need to read this book. Is it for people who don't know web services and want to learn? You cannot learn by this book. Is it a good reference book? NO. Therefore, this book is useless. Even the author himself doesn't know who is this book for. He wrote in his book:" It (the book) is more of a reference than a tutorial, but many of the chapters have a tutorial-like style. This book is designed to teach J2EE Web Services and is more than a reference." (page xxxiv of the book). From what the author wrote, we can see that this book is not a tutorial, and is not a good reference book. The author just copy and past some contents from Internet and mix up, that is the book.

Besides, the book repeats same XML document again and again, just wastes paper, and makes the book thick and heavy.

I wish this kind of book would disappear in amazon web site. I wnat to rate this book by 0 star.

Most of the other books about this subject are three or more years old. In other words, too old to be useful.

This book covers it all, from the details of mapping between Java and WSDL to the proper way to deploy web services, right down to the deployment descriptors.

It's a really well done book. I say this as somone who's currently writing web services and has been through many of the other books.

This book will teach you the basics you need to know about developing web services,it focus's on how to build Web services from Java and J2EE.Anybody who has a reasonable understanding of Java, J2ee and XML can easily cope with it.

I was a little bit afraid to buy this book because of many pages. I thought it could be like xdoclet ("computer generated")API book (:-)). NOT AT ALL. Before start of reading my knowledge of WS architecture had serious holes. Now after reading not only these holes are plumbed. I received complete new view of web services and I dare to prepare for certification exam now.
You get almost absolute grip of technologies like XML, XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL, JAX-RPC, JAXR, SAAJ, JAXP.
This is real Web Service bible. It is a MUST. Go ahead.

I bought 5 books on Web services. This is the one I use 99% of the time.

If you are a developer who wants to build working web services, buy this book. If you just want to know or talk about web services (i.e you are a manager), then buy other books that gives you an overview.

It is very unfortunate that this book will never get updated. The author (Monson-Haefel) decided not to write any more books.

This book disappointed me as it failed to meet my expectations. If compare this book to the author's EJB book then you will be disappointed like me as well. This book explained the basics of Web services and its J2EE examples. Although the content and examples are well paced at the end all I found is this book lacks a real world architecture and implementation strategies. Like me, many reviewers told the same as this book does'nt cover much more than the J2EE 1.4 tutorial in aspects of Web services. I felt like I lost my grasp of Java examples at the end as the book did'nt finish how to put all the APIs together.