Consuming, Providing & Publishing Web Services

   

Friday 25 February

 
10:05 - 11:00 Lecture 2 Consuming, Providing & Publishing Web Services Ioannis Baltopoulos

This lecture is the core of the whole Theme. Starting from where the last lecture finished it puts the introductory knowledge to work! We start by describing the necessary software environment and we then gradually build up our knowledge by first describing how to write Web Service Clients (Consumers) and following that how to write actual Web Services (Producers). The lecture closes with some information about how to structure a Web Services project in general and how to deploy the services on a production server and publish the information to a UDDI registry.

 Breakdown

  1. Basic Environment
    The whole lecture is based on developing Web Services using Java (the language), Eclipse (the IDE), Ant (the build mechanism) and of course Axis (the WS platform). We spend a few moments introducing the tools and learning how to use them.

  2. Writing Consumers
    Web Service clients can be written in a plethora of programming languages. In this section we will be demonstrating how this is done using Java and time permitting Macromedia’s Flash!

  3. Writing Producers (Within Axis)
    How to write a simple service within the Axis web application. This is the basic way of providing a web service; it provides a reasonable amount of flexibility but has some drawbacks.

  4. Writing Producers (Standalone)
    We will show how standalone web applications that offer a web service interface can be used to overcome the limitations from deploying Web Services within the Axis Web Application. This part of the lecture is based on a substantial example whose code will be given out after the lecture.

  5. Deploying the Services
    Description of the two ways web services can be deployed on production servers. This section will cover instant deployment and deployment through web service descriptors and web application deployment tools.

  6. Structuring a WS Project
    Moving away from the technology specifics, this section of the lecture aims at giving practical advice to the audience about how to structure a WS project and how existing code can be incorporated in the one.

  7. Publishing a WS using UDDI
    The last section will demonstrate how to dynamically publish a Web Service to a UDDI registry from where it can be found by consumers.