Major Revision of Java Web Services Courseware

October 4, 2007. Object Innovations has released its new course on building web services in the Java EE platform. Long a leader in Java Web services courseware, we are now able to provide a solid week of material on JAX-WS, JAXB, and supporting APIs that integrate web-service development with the annotation-driven approach common to other Java EE technology.

Course 561, "Developing Java Web Services", focuses on the WS-I Basic Profile (as does Java EE 5), meaning SOAP 1.1 and WSDL 1.1. It also illustrates how the previously scattered Java APIs for web services have been unified under JAX-WS. Now, developers can choose the right tool for a particular service-oriented job from a continuum of options ranging from the highly automatic to the "fully manual" approach of JAXP parsing.

We also highlight the points of contact between JAX-WS and other new Java EE standards. EJB3 supports JAX-WS/JAXB mappings to stateless session beans acting as web services; servlet components and JSF beans can inject references to web services using the @WebServiceRef annotation; and one exercise shows off the fascinating possibility of annotating the same domain class using JAXB for XML serialization and JPA for relational-database persistence.

For this important release, we've also undertaken to support Eclipse -- generally not a simple matter when working with standards-based web services, because of the code generation involved in builds. We've had a long talk with Eclipse about this and have convinced it (by way of carefully placed Ant builders) to trigger WSDL-to-Java or XML-to-Java code generation before running its own Java compilations. There are a few quirks, but with a little coaching students can now enjoy the advantages of Eclipse Europa for their code development throughout this course.

Version 1.5.3 of the course remains available, covering developing Java Web services using J2EE 1.4.

Shipments of the revised courseware begin immediately.