Java Code Geeks

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Whats happening in web service world?

Web service is being a very cool mechanism to make heterogeneous systems to talk to each other. It is really powerful and so its being a hit. Since this technology is widely used, its common to find tons of evolving concepts in and around web service. Web service makes possible to send SOAP messages over any transport protocol. Heterogeneous system talk to each other by exchanging those SOAP based XML documents. JAX-RPC based web services were mainly focused on calling remote procedures using SOAP over http. Slowly people found the real power of web service is not really to call remote procedures but to exchange certain XML documents over http/SMTP/TCP etc. Hence the newer specification is called as JAX-WS which supports - REST based web service, request-response based services, asynchronous services etc.
But there are lot of improvements are happening around web service. For example, web service gateway - this technique helps enterprise to expose their internal web service to the external world. Web Service aggregation - this helps to aggregate many number of smaller web services to one bigger one. SOAP OVER JSMS - this is also very interesting as HTTP being unreliable transport mechanism, if B2B communication is happening where reliability is necessary, use JMS instead of HTTP as transport mechanism of the SOAP messages. JMS will make sure that the SOAP messages are sent to the other end (it will persist the SOAP message and if communication fails, it will resend the message again).
There is another interesting JSR called - WSRP web service for remote portlets. This allows one portal server to consume local portlets as well as remote portlets through web services.
I am really thrilled to see all of these developments around web services.

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