Professional XML Web Services [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

~ (Author), Zaev Zoran (Author), Gary Damschen (Author), Chris Dix (Author), Patrick Cauldwell (Author), Rajesh Chawla (Author), Kristy Saunders (Author), Glenn Olander (Author), Francis Norton (Author), Tony Hong (Author), Uche Ogbuji (Author), Mark A. Richman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Whatever your favorite programming language, Professional XML Web Services does a good job at explaining recent technologies and tools needed to understand and use Web services. Whether you are a developer or an IT manager, this book's wide-ranging perspective on some late-breaking standards and tools will help you design and code the next generation of Web applications.

The strong cross-language perspective is what distinguishes this title from the rest of the pack. The book surveys actual tools for developing Web services in C++, Java, Perl, Python, and Microsoft's new C# language (part of .NET). Short chapters survey what's out there for Web services developers, with options from IBM, Sun, HP, and Microsoft. If you are somehow convinced that one vendor has a head start with Web services, you'll think again after reading this volume.

The heart of this text is its thorough and approachable tour of core standards needed for Web services, from the innards of SOAP for sending messages between systems over HTTP or other protocols, to WSDL for describing Web services and UDDI for looking them up at run-time. The book does a good job at fixing a very fast moving target. (SOAP 1.1 is used here instead of the emerging 1.2 standard.) Besides the new .NET (and ADO.NET) on the Microsoft platform, there's also coverage of the older SOAP Toolkit 2.0. Sections on using Perl and Python will help bring fans of these popular Web development languages onboard with Web services.

The authors conclude with two larger case studies, an interesting remote file system exposed through Web services using Java, plus an auction database done in the new C#. Anchoring the discussion in what are sure to be the two most popular choices for Web services development helps ensure this text has a practical focus, too. With its range of coverage of what Web services are and the actual standards and tools used to implement them, this title is a perfect choice for learning what all the fuss is about. It's all anyone needs to start designing and coding with Web services using many of today's most popular programming languages and tools. --Richard Dragan

Product Description

Web Services are self-describing, modular applications. The Web Services architecture can be thought of as a wrapper for the application code. This wrapper provides standardized means of: describing the Web Service and what it does; publishing it to a registry, so that it can easily be located; and exposing an interface, so that the service can be invoked - all in a machine-readable format. What is particularly compelling about Web Services is that they can be accessed by any client that understands XML, regardless of the platform, language, or object model.

This book provides a snapshot of the current state of these rapidly evolving technologies, beginning by detailing the main protocols that underpin the Web Services model (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI), and then putting this theory to practical use in a wide array of popular toolkits, platforms, and development environments.

The technologies presented in this book provide the foundations of Web Services computing, which is set to revolutionize Distributed Computing, as we know it.

This book covers:

The architecture of Web Services - past, present, and future

Detailed explanation of SOAP 1.1

An overview of SOAP 1.2

IBM Web Services Toolkit and Microsoft SOAP toolkit 2.0

Other SOAP implementations in Perl, C++, and PHP

Java Web Services with Apache SOAP

WSDL 1.1, UDDI 1.0, and 2.0

Creating and deploying Web Services using .Net

Building Web Services using Python

Applying security at both transport and application levels

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1000 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (September 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861005091
• ISBN-13: 978-1861005090
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,683,510 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a rushed job!, December 6, 2001

By	"ken64k" (Menlo Park, CA) - See all my reviews

Wow! This is yet another example of publishers sacrificing book quality for the desire to get something out to market quickly. I have truly enjoyed reading some Wrox books, e.g., Java Server Programming. For these types of book the "one author per chapter" model works out OK because the topics are independent. In this case, the results are terrible. The text has poor flow. There is lots of repetition because, apparently, the authors have not communicated well. There are many inconsistencies and bugs in the examples. Also, there is hardly a developer out there who needs to build web services on .NET and J2EE and using C++, Perl and Python. Pick a platform and focus. Teach me something real. For example, the book talks about the Apache SOAP engine. Well, anyone familiar with the Apache web service efforts knows that Apache SOAP is deprecated in favor of Apache Axis (their next gen web service engine). I'm hoping that "Building Web Services with Java" (still not out) is going to do the right for me but I'm not optimistic. Please, someone write a good book on web services that combines theory and practice in a single easy to read package.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Best Web Services book currently available, December 19, 2001

By A Customer

This is a good intro to various topics related to web services, probably the best one available so far (admittedly a pretty small field at this time). It covers the standards behind the technology and proceeds to practical working examples of how to put web services into use. There is some coverage of projected future technologies, but mostly sticks to systems that are currently available (skipping, for example, Apache Axis). The author-per-chapter approach means the chapters are somewhat independent, so you can select a topic of interest and go right to that chapter, without having to read everything that came before it. On the other hand, it means some material is covered in multiple places in the book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dated, but still valuable, July 26, 2004

By	C Ferrenzo (Manchester, UK) - See all my reviews

I realise this book is now out of date, and therefore not relevant to much of what is happening in the Web Services world. However, when I first read it, it did help me get an understanding of some of the more important Web Services fundamentals. The tutorials on WSDL and SOAP especially were useful to me, as were the comparions of the various vendor toolkits that implemented SOAP messaging. There may be more current books out there, but if you can get a used or discounted copy of this title, it's still worth it.