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:
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
Since Chris Dix works at navtrak and they have problems with web services working. They must be using only this book. Navtrak is the worst.
Rating: 1 / 5
I would rather wait for the tech to mature for better quality books. I got lost and never proceeded to read after a few
initial chapters. My advice to the authors would be to keep the readers interested and not throw him/her off course and lose interest totally in the subject.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a pretty good anthology about web services, with a number of different topics covered in depth. I like that you can read just a chapter about a subject of interest without having to read the whole book up to that point. At 1000 pages, I wouldn’t want to read the whole book from beginning to end anyway. However, it is uneven. There are some good chapters about SOAP, but other chapters, for example, UDDI, are not so good.
Rating: 3 / 5
I am totally new to Web services, and know not a lot about XML. This book I found was for me a very nice general overall introduction to webservices. It was enough to get me immediatley started in Web services. I can definitley recommend this book to anyone new to Web services.
Rating: 4 / 5
Do you have to develop Web Services within the next few months? Then this is a good book to have.
Remember, that this is a new technology and things seem to be changing at a very rapid pace. So, by the time you buy this book verify that this is not out of date. In the current form, I would recommend this book till early part of 2002.
Rating: 4 / 5