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Originally published at Internet.comThe idea of Web services has been floating around for a while, and we have seen many companies embracing the concept and moving ahead with implementation plans. Just like a Web application that consists of server-side code, a Web server, HTML pages, and a browser, Web services also consist of various components. Implementations of SOAP and UDDI have been in existence for a while. What caught my attention with Idoox's WASP (Web Application and Services Platform) was that it provides a single platform for creating, publishing, discovering, and using Web services.
WASP downloads come in two flavors. One is bundled with Apache Tomcat and the other is not, which means you have to manually configure it. I opted for the bundled version which was about 4.5 MB. "By using a familiar model and providing a series of utility scripts/tools, Idoox simplifies the entire creation and deployment process.
The process of creating a Web service using WASP is similar to how you create a CORBA or RMI service. The first thing, obviously, is the business logic that you want to advertise as a service. This could be a simple Java class that makes some calculations or provides a message. This business logic will act as a server responding to requests made by various clients. Both the client and the server should be wrapped in a single package. The .jar files used by WASP are wasp.jar (which includes a variety of classes as implemented by idoox supporting SOAP, etc.), xerces.jar (Apache XML parser) and log4j (for application logging)...
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