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Introduction to Web Services

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[28This
] part of the tutorial discusses Java EE 7 web services technologies. These
technologies include Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) and Java API for
RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS).
The following topics are addressed here:
■ What Are Web Services?
■ Types of Web Services
■ Deciding Which Type of Web Service to Use

27.1 What Are Web Services?

Web services are client and server applications that communicate over the World Wide
Web's (WWW) HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As described by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), web services provide a standard means of interoperating
between software applications running on a variety of platforms and frameworks.
Web services are characterized by their great interoperability and extensibility as well
as their machine-processable descriptions, thanks to the use of XML. Web services can
be combined in a loosely coupled way to achieve complex operations. Programs
providing simple services can interact with each other to deliver sophisticated
added-value services.

27.2 Types of Web Services

On the conceptual level, a service is a software component provided through a
network-accessible endpoint. The service consumer and provider use messages to
exchange invocation request and response information in the form of self-containing
documents that make very few assumptions about the technological capabilities of the
receiver.
On a technical level, web services can be implemented in various ways. The two types
of web services discussed in this section can be distinguished as "big" web services and
"RESTful" web services.

27.2.1 "Big" Web Services

In Java EE 7, JAX-WS provides the functionality for "big" web services, which are
described in Chapter 28, "Building Web Services with JAX-WS". Big web services use
XML messages that follow the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard, an
XML language defining a message architecture and message formats. Such systems
often contain a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service,

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Types of Web Services

written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), an XML language for
defining interfaces syntactically.
The SOAP message format and the WSDL interface definition language have gained
widespread adoption. Many development tools, such as NetBeans IDE, can reduce the
complexity of developing web service applications.
A SOAP-based design must include the following elements.
■ A formal contract must be established to describe the interface that the web service
offers. WSDL can be used to describe the details of the contract, which may
include messages, operations, bindings, and the location of the web service. You
may also process SOAP messages in a JAX-WS service without publishing a
WSDL.
■ The architecture must address complex nonfunctional requirements. Many web
service specifications address such requirements and establish a common
vocabulary for them. Examples include transactions, security, addressing, trust,
coordination, and so on.
■ The architecture needs to handle asynchronous processing and invocation. In such
cases, the infrastructure provided by standards, such as Web Services Reliable
Messaging (WSRM), and APIs, such as JAX-WS, with their client-side
asynchronous invocation support, can be leveraged out of the box.

27.2.2 RESTful Web Services

In Java EE 7, JAX-RS provides the functionality for Representational State Transfer
(RESTful) web services. REST is well suited for basic, ad hoc integration scenarios.
RESTful web services, often better integrated with HTTP than SOAP-based services
are, do not require XML messages or WSDL service-API definitions.
Project Jersey is the production-ready reference implementation for the JAX-RS
specification. Jersey implements support for the annotations defined in the JAX-RS
specification, making it easy for developers to build RESTful web services with Java
and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
Because RESTful web services use existing well-known W3C and Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) standards (HTTP, XML, URI, MIME) and have a lightweight
infrastructure that allows services to be built with minimal tooling, developing
RESTful web services is inexpensive and thus has a very low barrier for adoption. You
can use a development tool such as NetBeans IDE to further reduce the complexity of
developing RESTful web services.
A RESTful design may be appropriate when the following conditions are met.
■ The web services are completely stateless. A good test is to consider whether the
interaction can survive a restart of the server.
■ A caching infrastructure can be leveraged for performance. If the data that the web
service returns is not dynamically generated and can be cached, the caching
infrastructure that web servers and other intermediaries inherently provide can be
leveraged to improve performance. However, the developer must take care
because such caches are limited to the HTTP GET method for most servers.
■ The service producer and service consumer have a mutual understanding of the
context and content being passed along. Because there is no formal way to
describe the web services interface, both parties must agree out of band on the
schemas that describe the data being exchanged and on ways to process it
meaningfully. In the real world, most commercial applications that expose services

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 Deciding Which Type of Web Service to Use

as RESTful implementations also distribute so-called value-added toolkits that

describe the interfaces to developers in popular programming languages.
■ Bandwidth is particularly important and needs to be limited. REST is particularly
useful for limited-profile devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones, for which the
overhead of headers and additional layers of SOAP elements on the XML payload
must be restricted.
■ Web service delivery or aggregation into existing websites can be enabled easily
with a RESTful style. Developers can use such technologies as JAX-RS and
Asynchronous JavaScript with XML (Ajax) and such toolkits as Direct Web
Remoting (DWR) to consume the services in their web applications. Rather than
starting from scratch, services can be exposed with XML and consumed by HTML
pages without significantly refactoring the existing website architecture. Existing
developers will be more productive because they are adding to something they are
already familiar with rather than having to start from scratch with new
technology.
RESTful web services are discussed in Chapter 29, "Building RESTful Web Services
with JAX-RS". This chapter contains information about generating the skeleton of a
RESTful web service using both NetBeans IDE and the Maven project-management
tool.

27.3 Deciding Which Type of Web Service to Use

Basically, you want to use RESTful web services for integration over the web and big
web services in enterprise application–integration scenarios that have advanced
quality-of-service (QoS) requirements.
■ JAX-WS: Addresses advanced QoS requirements that commonly occur in
enterprise computing. When compared to JAX-RS, JAX-WS makes it easier to
support the WS-* set of protocols, which provide standards for security and
reliability, among other things, and interoperate with other WS-* conforming
clients and servers.
■ JAX-RS: Makes it easier to write web applications that apply some or all of the
constraints of the REST style to induce desirable properties in the application, such
as loose coupling (evolving the server is easier without breaking existing clients),
scalability (start small and grow), and architectural simplicity (use off-the-shelf
components, such as proxies or HTTP routers). You would choose to use JAX-RS
for your web application because it is easier for many types of clients to consume
RESTful web services while enabling the server side to evolve and scale. Clients
can choose to consume some or all aspects of the service and mash it up with other
web-based services.

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