Im just getting started looking at web services myself , so dont have a detailed technical grasp, but a seminar I attended a couple of days ago is still fresh in my mind so Ill have a go at fielding this one...
What you have done would fit into the 'academic' definition of a 'web service quite nicely'. Of course it doesn't make use of the standards (SOAP, WSDL) which means its a proprietary implementation of a web service and for anyone to use it they would have to use your methodology and message format. Roughly speaking, your dtd seems to be taking the place of of the wsdl document, and your own xml format taking the place of the SOAP envelope & data. The 'popular' conception of a web service is of course one that involves the use of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and such like, so when you talk about 'web services' this is what comes to peoples minds. Id most strongly suggest that you now convert (or investigate how difficult it would be to convert) what you have done to make use of soap and wsdl to make it easier for others to make use of your service. Having reinvented parts of those wheels yourself, you will probably find it a quite interesting exercise to see how what you do compares with the standards. With the knowledge you gained doing it your way, you should find learning the standard way much easier as you will see much of the reasoning behind things in the standard having covered that ground yourself already! You will want to take a look at the AXIS project first as you will probably want to make use of it: http://ws.apache.org/axis/ IBM are pretty big on Web Services (and have donated a ton of web services stuff to the opensource community) so go take a look at whats available on their developerWorks site: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/ And of course the w3c web service stuff is at: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/ And the WS-I at: http://www.ws-i.org/ -----Original Message----- From: Greg Hess [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 21 August 2003 03:11 To: Struts Subject: [OT] Web Services, what have I done? Hi All, This post might seem odd but I am looking for some insight into a solution that I have implemented. I am trying to get a better understanding of how my implementation fits into the grand scheme of a Web Service and how I might document this implementation. I have been reading about WSDL and about SOAP and am still not sure what I have done J, and how my implementation is compatible or not compatible with what the industry is calling a Web Service mainly for documentation purposes even though I would love to build this functionality based on industry standards. I have built a web app using STRUTS of course that allows for external remote systems to invoke RPC's (Remote Procedure Call) on an area of the apps functionality. I allow remote systems to communicate using XML over HTTP POST. Communication involves the invocation request and response. I have created a invocation.dtd that defines the invocation data structure and all the supported methods and arguments and the response.dtd that defines the result data structure returned by any invocation. As far as I can understand so far this is very similar to a SOAP envelope. The client of this implementation builds the invocation XML data structure as defined by invocation.dtd, opens a connection to defined URL and writes the XML invocation directly to the connections OutputStream and reads the XML response directly from the connections InputStream. Having built this implementation and ducking the learning curve of Web Services, SOAP implementation because I found it difficult to implement with my shaky understanding of Web Services I am hoping that I might now be able to get a better understanding of Web Services and how they relate to what I have done in the hopes that I might get inline with the industry and write great software and document what I have done J. Any insight is greatly appreciated. Kind Regards, Greg Hess Software Engineer Wrapped Apps Corporation 275 Michael Cowpland Dr. Suite 201 Ottawa, Ontario K2M 2G2 Tel: (613) 591 -7552 Fax: (613) 591-0523 1 (877) 388-6742 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
