Download Safari Books Online apps: Apple iOS | Android

Entire Site

Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.

Part IV: JAX-RPC

Everything you have learned so far in this book has led to this part, on JAX-RPC. To master JAX-RPC you'll need to build on what you learned about XML, WSDL, and SOAP. If, however, you're just trying to get started by learning as little as possible, then you're in luck. You can develop very basic Web services using JAX-RPC with little or no knowledge about underlying Web services technologies.

The quickest way to get started with JAX-RPC is to read Chapter 9, which is an overview of the entire JAX-RPC platform. It will help you decide which chapters you should read from this part of the book. You don't need to read all of Part IV to start developing Web services. After reading Chapter 9, you'll probably want to read Chapter 10 and Section 12.1, which cover JAX-RPC service endpoints and generated stubs respectively. These are the programming models that you are most likely to use to develop basic Web service clients and services. The rest of the material in this part of the book covers intermediate and advanced topics that are important to developing a well-rounded understanding of JAX-RPC.

While Part IV provides extensive coverage of the JAX-RPC programming APIs, it doesn't cover deployment descriptors and packaging, which are essential to J2EE development. Deployment considerations are pretty complex in their own right and are covered in detail in Part VII: Deployment. You'll need to read and understand at least some of Part VII to be able to deploy J2EE Web Services clients and services.

There is one JAX-RPC topic not covered by this book: extensible type mappings. An extensible type mapping is a mechanism for defining custom translations between XML and Java. The supporting mechanism is not clearly defined and is always implemented in a vendor-specific manner. It's simply not possible to cover this topic without covering all vendors, and that isn't practical. For more information on implementing extensible type mappings, see your J2EE product documentation, as it will usually be the best guide to vendor-specific features.