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Building Web Services with Workshop for WebLogic

You can build enterprise-class web services with Workshop for WebLogic. Web services built with Workshop for WebLogic employ standard web service technologies: XML, SOAP, and WSDL. Workshop for WebLogic simplifies web service development by allowing you to focus on application logic, rather than the complex implementation details traditionally required by these technologies.

Workshop for WebLogic also offers the web service Design View, a graphical tool for designing, creating, and edit web services.

The following sections explain the basic concepts that you need to know about to begin building web services with Workshop for WebLogic, and point you to more in-depth information about each.

Web Service Design View

The web service Design View gives a graphical, intuitive view of a web service and its operations. It also makes it easy to perform complex coding and design tasks. For more information on the Design View see Using Design View to Create Web Services.

Web Service Projects

You build web services within a web service project. A web service project corresponds to a J2EE web application with the addition of facets to support web services. You may build multiple web services within a single project.

For more information on applications and projects, see Applications and Projects.

The Web Service Class

The web service class is the core of your web service. It is an ordinary Java class (decorated with the @WebService annotation) that determines how your web service behaves, often through the use of one or more controls that contain the web service's application logic. You can think of a web service built on Workshop for WebLogic as a Java class which communicates with the outside world through XML messages. This documentation assumes you are familiar with Java programming.

You design a web service in the Workshop for WebLogic integrated development environment.

Methods and Callbacks

Your web service has a public interface that clients may call over the internet. This interface is made up of methods and callbacks. The methods that your web service exposes are called by clients; the callbacks are methods on the client that your web service calls to send information back to the client. These methods and callbacks are available over the internet because they are decorated with the @WebMethod annotation.

Within your web service code, you may also have non-public methods that are not exposed to clients. These methods perform internal functions in your web service. These methods are not decorated with @WebMethod.

The controls that your web service uses also expose methods and events. Your web service functions as a client of the control, calling its methods and implementing its event handlers.

Custom Controls

You can use custom controls in your web service to implement the application logic of your web service. Custom controls in turn use system controls to access enterprise resources such as databases, legacy applications, and other web services. In other words, your web service interacts with a custom control by calling its control methods and implementing event handlers for its control events, and the custom control calls control methods and implements event handlers for any system controls it uses.

Workshop for WebLogic provides system controls for connecting to common resources. The system controls provided with Workshop for WebLogic are:

For more information about system controls, see Using System Controls. For information on building custom controls, see Custom Controls.

Properties

Most of the elements that make up your web service-methods, callbacks, controls, and the web service itself-have properties that you can set to specify their characteristics. You can set properties in the Annotations view in the Workshop for WebLogic IDE. Each element of your web service has one or more annotations, each with a set of attributes, corresponding to the element's properties in the Annotations view. Properties are stored in your code as Java 5 annotations (beginning with @). You can also edit annotations them directly in the code editor if you wish.

Conversations and Asynchronous Communication

Many processes take time to complete. When a client makes a request from a web service, if the web service doesn't return a response right away, the client may be left waiting for it, unable to continue other operations. Web services that you build with Workshop for WebLogic can address this problem by relying on asynchronous communication.

When a client and web service communicate asynchronously, the web service immediately acknowledges the client's request, then continues processing the request. The client is free to continue performing other work. For more information on building asynchronous web services, see Designing Asynchronous Interfaces.

A web service and its client may also participate in a conversation. The conversation keeps track of state-related data for this exchange between client and service.The conversation correlates the client's requests and the service's response by means of a conversation ID, a unique identifier that is generated when the client initiates a conversation with the service.

For more information on conversations, see Creating Conversational Web Services in the WebLogic Sever documentation and Tutorial: Creating a Web Service with Timer Control.

Starting Points for Designing a Web Service

Developers often design web services around preexisting data structures and contracts. Two common starting points are WSDL files and XSD files.

Starting from a WSDL

When building a web service, it is often easier to build the web service implementation around an already existing web service contract (a WSDL file). This method for creating a web service is sometimes called "WSDL first", "contract first" or "top down" web service design.

Starting from a Schema File

Another common approach to design web services is to start with an XML schema file (an XSD file), compile XMLBeans from the schema, and then build a web service implementation centered on those XMLBean classes.

For more information on how Workshop for WebLogic supports both these approaches to web service design, see Web Service Development Starting Points.

Related Topics

Designing Asynchronous Interfaces

Working with Controls

Creating Conversational Web Services

 

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