Planning to use Web services

This topic discusses how to plan your use of Web services that are developed and implemented based on the Web Services for Java 2 Platform,
Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification.

Read the Web services scenario: Overview which tells the story of a fictional online garden supply retailer named Plants by WebSphere and how this retailer incorporated the Web services concept.

Web services are Web applications that help you be more flexible in your business processes by integrating with applications that otherwise do not communicate.

Web services reflect the service-oriented architecture approach to programming. This approach is based on the idea of building applications by discovering and implementing network-available services, or by invoking the available applications to accomplish a task. Web services deliver interoperability, for example, Web services applications provide a way for components created in different programming languages to work together as if they were created using the same language. Web services rely on existing transport technologies, such as HTTP, and standard data encoding techniques, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), for invoking the implementation.

To plan to use Web services:

1. Identify your goals and design Web services to fit your e-business solution. Consider what you want to accomplish by using Web services. Decide how Web services fit into your current topology, applications and programming model. Determine how the Web services process requests on the server and how the clients manage and use the Web service.

2. Design your Web services for reliability, availability, manageability and security. For example, you want your Web services to process a transaction in a reasonable time at all hours of the day and provide users with good security characteristics, such as authentication for buyers. Planning to use Web services to work with WebSphere Application Server helps to meet these requirements.

3. To support Web services, extend WebSphere Application Server to support Web services standards. For interoperable Web services running on platforms supplied by multiple vendors, standards are essential.

4. Decide what development and implementation tools to use. You can use a variety of manual development and implementation tasks. Whether you have an existing Web service to implement or you want to develop your own from a Java bean or from EJB, you can choose different tasks respective to your resources. You can also use Rational Application Developer (RAD) to complete development and implementation tasks.

   See Developing Web services for information about developing Web services based on the Java language through the WebSphere Application Server. To read more about RAD see the information center for the product.

5. Install WebSphere Application Server.

6. Review Web services Samples.

ResultYou have a design plan for implementing Web services applications into your business architecture.

What to do next

This topic explains how to develop a Web service using the Web Services for J2EE specification.

Related concepts
Accessing the Samples (Samples Gallery)

Related tasks
Install WebSphere Application Server
Developing Web services applications

Related reference
Web services: Resources for learning