Books and References on Web Services in Java

[Sidoh]

I know some of you have done a bunch of stuff with web services.  Can you recommend some good books and/or references on Java web services?

[iago]

I don't know much about Java, but there are really nice step-by-step tutorials (labs) on setting up and using Web services in Visual Studios. I did the labs front the back, and that was sufficient (Web services really are simple, when it comes right down to it). I recommend finding something like that for Java.

[Sidoh]

Yeah, that'd be great.

Could someone direct Camel to this post?  I'm sure he'd have some good input on the subject.

[Ender]

Your question is kind of vague... this may not help, but no harm in posting.

Servlets and JSP are two serverside Java technologies. JDBC is the main library java programmers use to access SQL databases, or at least it was two years ago. Apache Tomcat is something you may want to look into; it is built on servlets and JSP and helps people build web applications.

Also, I suggest posting on the Sun java forums... those guys are java beasts.

[Sidoh]

I don't think we're talking about the same things; that's probably why the question seems vague.  I'm referring to publishing classes and methods and making them accessible through stuff like SOAP calls.

Here's an article on JAX-WS that I've been reading that might clear it up a bit: https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/jax-ws-ea3/docs/annotations.html.

Java annotations makes publishing web services really easy, but I'd still like to read up on them a bit beyond a few Internet articles.

[iago]

Web services are really easy.

[Sidoh]

Oh, yeah.  I'm not saying they're a complicated concept, but the annotations makes it all really seamless.  You basically tell the compiler to call a preprocessor by saying "Hey, I want this method to be a web service.  Take care of that for me," and everything else is done behind the scenes for you.  There are built-in role-based security mechanisms that can all be used through the annotations as well.

It's all pretty intuitive, but since it's completely new to me and I've never messed around with them before, I figured it'd be good to do some more formal reading on them.

I get free access to safaribooksonline.com, which looks like it has some pretty good books on web services, but I was wondering if you guys had some titles to recommend.

[iago]

Nice.

Visual Studio does Web services by generating proxies for you, then you call them and they look after the remote calls. Probably very similar.

As I said, I can't recommend anything, but I can keep this thread active till somebody does.

[Camel]

i couldn't recommend any books, but i will put a strong recommendation on the google web toolkit; i've been using it for a few weeks, and i'm loving it
if the client isn't going to be a browser, then you should consider cxf, which is a pretty good soap container - you write wsdl, and it generates interfaces for you to implement, and then it re-generates wsdl again on the fly from the annotations (it's pretty messy, but that's the standard)
for WS container: i've only used tomcat, but i hear they're all the same

I've grown to dislike annotations quite a bit; their purpose seems ambiguous. It's pretty well agreed that anything you put in a class at the highest level of exposure of a WS is to be publicized - be that a field in a bean, or a operation in a service class.

Using the GWT will allow you to write pure Java (the client code is compiled in to JavaScript), and enforces quite a few good habits on you. I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the additude of the issue tracker's administrators (they're quick to reject issues), but the developers seem to be pretty well centered. I'm currently working out of the head of svn, since there are a few blocking bugs with the 1.5 RC that they've resolved for me.

[Ender]

haha yeah looks like I didn't understand your question