The web services architecture provides a new way to think about and implement application-to-application integration and interoperability that makes the development platform irrelevant. Two applications, regardless of operating system, programming language, or any other technical implementation detail, communicate using XML messages over open Internet protocols such as HTTP or SMTP. The Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) is a specification that details how to encode that information and has become the messaging protocol of choice for Web services. Programming Web Services with SOAP is a detailed guide to using SOAP and other leading web services standards--WSDL (Web Service Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration protocol). You'll learn the concepts of the web services architecture and get practical advice on building and deploying web services in the enterprise. This authoritative book decodes the standards, explaining the concepts and implementation in a clear, concise style. You'll also learn about the major toolkits for building and deploying web services. Examples in Java, Perl, C#, and Visual Basic illustrate the principles. Significant applications developed using Java and Perl on the Apache Tomcat web platform address real issues such as security, debugging, and interoperability. Covered topic areas include:

• The Web Services Architecture
• SOAP envelopes, headers, and encodings
• WSDL and UDDI
• Writing web services with Apache SOAP and Java
• Writing web services with Perl's SOAP::Lite
• Peer-to-peer (P2P) web services
• Enterprise issues such as authentication, security, and identity
• Up-and-coming standards projects for web services

Programming Web Services with SOAP provides you with all the information on the standards, protocols, and toolkits you'll need to integrate information services with SOAP. You'll find a solid core of information that will help you develop individual Web services or discover new ways to integrate core business processes across an enterprise.

Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  March 11 2002
Submitted by Hans Wolter   [Respond | View]

The first 2 chapters of this book are an overview of the problem web services. They are okay. But when I started to work with the examples of chapters 3 and 4 I got very angry. No example worked out of the box. The authors don't tell a beginner which steps are needed to get the examples running. I've spent a lot of time to get them running. But I'm very frustrated. E. g. the installation of SOAP::Lite is a real frustrating adventure. It is not mentioned that you have to install IO-Stringy, MailTools, MIME-Lite, MIME-Tools. You have to find out yourself where you can get those packages. When I tried to install jabber I got version conflicts etc. Actually I've have problems with the publisher example, because with this example I can't login. The result of my login trial is: "Caught Exception: SOAPException = SOAP-ENV:Client, No Deserializer found to deserialize a 'http://www.soaplite.com/authInfo:authInfo' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'."

My opinion about a good book is, that there should be a lot of examples that explain the basis of a problem. Those examples should work out of the box. Then I've the possibilty to reach the aim of understanding the hype web services. With the introduced examples I'm not able to.

I hope the authors will do better with the next publishing of this book.




Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  March 01 2002
Submitted by Daniel Van Begin   [Respond | View]

A good overview of SOAP with some very practical examples. Very exciting reading.

Still, a few mistakes in the examples makes them hard to try out.

The appendix C (code listings) is a waste of space.

I would have prefer an appendix on how to install a typical web service.

The book covers mostly rpc binding and not much document binding.

Not a lot about SOAP over e-mail, SOAP attachments or ebXML, ...


Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  February 27 2002
Submitted by Tad   [Respond | View]

While I have not finished the book yet, it is a very good starting point for understanding SOAP. It is unbiased and does a decent job of identifying differences and interoperability problems between popular languages and implementations. It is much better than other books I have seen on SOAP, most seem to just cut and paste the majority of the w3c spec document and provide rehashed content from SOAP related web sites. I would say it lives up to the quality and completeness I expect from an O'Reilly publication.


Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  February 22 2002
Submitted by Christopher Carver   [Respond | View]

The book is a good starter explaining SOAP, but I have yet to get the first Java example in the book to run. I understand that there a dozens of versions software out there you have to get and configure, but the author leaves it up to you to figure out 99% of it. Thus this gets really frustrating and really old fast. Hopefully a version two will take care of this.




Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  February 19 2002
Submitted by David Tate   [Respond | View]

Very good technical overview of SOAP and web services in general, including a summary of XML Schema. Recommended reading.




Programming Web Services with SOAP Review,  February 16 2002
Submitted by Stephen Martin   [Respond | View]

I think the errors in some of the perl listings will cause a great deal

of fustration to those new to SOAP. Also the examples using jabber

all failed with ..

Can't locate object method "AddDelegate" via package "Net::Jabber::Protocol"

this occurred both with my home spun experiments and some of the examples

from the examples zip file.

I have scoured the internet and news groups for anyone else who may have

encountered and fixed this problem.. as yet no one else has encountered this.

I,m hoping to find a solution some how.

At the moment I am about 1/3 of a way through the book.

Stephen