Building and Publishing the First Database Web Service

In this section, we discuss building a web service for a fictitious bookstore, Big Barrel Books (BBB), that needs to enable its partners to promote and sell its books. Through web services, BBB’s partners will be able to query and update its catalog of books in the Oracle database.

Setting Up the Database Schema

In real applications, the database schema that is set up to manage a bookstore may be very complicated. It may require more than one table, with many columns in each table, such as a separate table to store data for the authors of the book. However, in this example, to help you focus on the techniques of building web services, we have greatly simplified the definition of these tables. Therefore, the following table, called book, is created to store the records of books: