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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

Programming Web Services with SOAP shows how to build distributed applications using XML Web services. The authors explain what SOAP is, and how it is implemented in Java with Apache SOAP, in Perl with SOAP::Lite, and on Microsoft's.NET Framework. They also present a snapshot of what is happening with Web services, with shrewd comments about standards, implementations and industry battlegrounds. The book is realistic about areas of weakness in the SOAP specification, highlighting problem areas such as incompatibilities and lack of security standards. James Snell and Doug Tidwell work on SOAP and related technologies at IBM, while Pavel Kulchenko is the author of SOAP::Lite, so this is a particularly well-informed team. Perhaps inevitably, they cover Java and Perl implementations in more detail than .Net, which means this may not be the best title for developers intending to work primarily with Microsoft's platform. The early chapters offer an introductory overview, describing the SOAP specification and giving simple examples in Perl, Java and .Net. Next comes a more complex example, using a Perl server and an Apache SOAP client. There is a chapter on describing Web services with WSDL, and another on discovering Web services with the UDDI registry or the more recent WS-Inspection language. The authors then give a real-world example, explaining the CodeShare Service Network, an open source project for sharing code. Finally, there is a look at security and a peek into the future of SOAP. In the end SOAP is software plumbing, as the authors readily admit, and makes a rather dry topic. Even so, it is an essential part of Web development today and this short, clear presentation does a great job of showing how to put it to work. --Tim Anderson