Deploying and Testing Web Services

Application Server enables you to easily deploy and test web services. Admin Console automatically generates a test web page that makes it very easy to verify a web service's operation without writing a client application.

• Deploying Web Services

• Viewing Deployed Web Services

• Testing Web Services

• Web Services Security

Deploying Web Services

You can deploy a web service:

• In a web application, packaged as a web archive (WAR) file. Using Admin Console, go to Application Server > Applications > Web Applications, then click Deploy.

• In an enterprise Java Bean (EJB), packaged as an EJB-JAR file. Using Admin Console, go to Application Server > Applications > EJB Modules, then click Deploy.

A web service can also be implemented by a POJO (plain old Java Object). Deploy a POJO web service using the auto-deploy feature by dragging and dropping it into the auto-deploy directory. Application Server will automatically generate the appropriate deployment descriptor files and deploy the web service.

In Admin Console, you can view a list of deployed web services under Application Server > Web Services | General.

You can also use the deploy(1) command to deploy a web service.

Viewing Deployed Web Services

To view a list of all deployed web services with Admin Console, select Application Server > Web Services. The General tab displays a table containing the following information:

• Name of the web service. Click on it to display details.

• Application to which the web service belongs. Click on the name to display details of the web application or EJB module.

• WSDL file for the web service. Click on the file name to display the contents of the file.

• Type of the web service (SERVLET or EJB)

To view details of a web service with Admin Console, select Web Services > web-service-name | General. Admin Console displays the attributes of the web service:

• Name: The name of the web service.

• Endpoint Address URI: The URI of the web service endpoint.

• Application: The name of the web service application. Click on the link to display the properties of the web application or EJB module.

• WSDL: The name of the WSDL file. Click on the link to display the WSDL file for the web service.

• Module name: the name of the WAR or JAR file for the web service.

• Mapping File: The name of the mapping file. Click on the link to display the Java WSDL mapping file. This only applies to JSR 109 applications. The file will be empty for JAX-WS 2.0 applications.

• Webservices.xml: Click on the link to display the webservices.xml file.

• Implementation Type: SERVLET or EJB

• Implementation Class Name: Java class implementing the web service.

• Deployment Descriptors: For servlet implementations, displays web.xml and sun-web.xml; for EJB implementations, ejb-jar.xml and sun-ejb-jar.xml. Click on the links to display the files' contents.

You can also view deployed web services with the list-components(1) command with the --type webservice option.

Testing Web Services

Admin Console enables you to test web services and diagnose problems.

To test a web service with Admin Console, select Web Services > web-service-name | General, then click the Test button. For JAX-WS 2.0–compliant web services, Application Server generates a test page when a JAX-WS 2.0 web service is deployed. You can launch the test web page from Admin Console to easily verify a web service's operation without writing a client application.

The automatically-generated test page contains a form that enables you to invoke all the web service's methods and display the SOAP messages for each method invocation. The test page also contains a link that displays the WSDL file returned from the sever instance; that is, the runtime version of the WSDL file, not the packaged version.

Web Services Security

Application Server supports SOAP message layer security based on the SAML token profile of WS-Security. Application Server also provides tamper-proof auditing for web services. For more information, see Auditing Authentication and Authorization Decisions and Audit Modules.

You can use default message security providers to provide web services security. Use the following commands to customize the message security providers:

• create-message-security-provider(1)

• delete-message-security-provider(1)

• list-message-security-providers(1)

For more information about configuring security for web services, see Chapter 9, Configuring Message Security