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A free online “Web Services Programming” course is about to begin on Oct. 26th, 2005 for anyone who wants to learn Web services programming. In this 13-week course, attendees learn basic Web Services standards such as SOAP and WSDL, and Java API’s for Web services such as JAX-WS, SAAJ, and JAXR. The principles of SOA and relevant technologies such as JBI and BPEL are also addressed. They also learn how to use NetBeans IDE effectively for building and deploying Web services.

This course runs very much like a regular college course in which the attendees are expected to do weekly homework and final project but it is free and can be taken online.  There is also class group alias where attendees can ask/answer questions. The complete set of course contents (StarOffice slides with detailed speaker notes and some audio files, homework assignments, reading materials, code samples, FAQ etc.) are available on the website of the course.

The only thing you have to do in order to join the course is sending an email to

  webservicesprogramming-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

For detailed information about this course, please go to the following class website.

  Course website: http://www.javapassion.com/webservices
  Course schedule: http://www.javapassion.com/webservices/#ClassSchedule
  Course group alias: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webservicesprogramming/

WS-Security in the Enterprise, Part 1: Problem Introduction by Denis Pilipchuk — WS-Security doesn’t exist in a vacuum–in an enterprise, it must work with many other systems, which means dealing with other access control systems and potential incompatibilities. Denis Pilupchuk begins his series on integrating WS-Security and enterprise systems by spelling out where the problem lies and what pieces need to be created to resolve it.

 WS-Security in the Enterprise, Part 2: The Framework by Denis Pilipchuk — Denis Pilupchuk continues his series on developing a WS-Security toolkit by developing a general framework to match the needs identified in part one and by starting to map WSSE features to Java objects.

BPEL4WS stands for Business Process Execution Language for Web Services.

Business Process can be described in two ways:

- Executable business processes, which model actual behavior of a participant in a business interaction.

- Business protocols(abstract processes), which use process descriptions that specify the mutually visible message exchange behavior of each of the parties involved in the protocol, without revealing their internal behavior.

BEPL4WS provides a language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols.

BPEL4WS extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions.

BPEL4WS defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces.

BPEL4WS uses a notion of message properties to identify protocol-relevant data embedded in messages which can be viewed as “transparent” data relevant to public aspects as oppsed to the “opaque” data that internal/private functions use.

- Transparent data affects the public business protocol in a direct way

- Opaque data affects the business protocol only by creating nondeterminism.

Any data that is used to affect the behavior of a business protocol must be transparent and hence viewed as a property.

BPEL4WS defines a model and a grammar for describing the behavior of a business process based on interactions between the process and its partners. The interaction with each partner occurs through Web Service interfaces, and the structure of the relationship at the interface level is encapsulated in what we call a partner link.

The BEEP4WS process defines how multiple service interactions with these partners are coordinated to achieve a business goal, as well as the state and the logic necessary for this coordination.

BPEL4WS also introduces systematic mechanisms for dealing with business exceptions and processing faults.

Finally, BPEL4WS introduces a mechanism to define how individual or composite activities within a process are to be compensated in cases where exceptions occur or a partner requests reversal.

BPEL4WS is layered on top of several XML specifications: WSDL1.1, XML Schema 1.0, and XPath1.0.

- WSDL messages and XML Schema type definitions provide the data model used by BPEL4WS processes.

- XPath provides support for data manipulation.

- All external resources and partners are represented as WSDL services.

To add Axis to an existing webapp, follow the steps below:

1. Copy all .jar files in the directory axis/WEB-INF/lib to the existing webapp, for example, DemoApp/WEB-INF/lib.

2. Copy the classes directory in the directory axis/WEB-INF/ to DemoApp/WEB-INF/.

3. Copy the file axis/WEB-INF/server-config.wsdd to DemoApp/WEB-INF/.

4. Copy the file axis/index.html to DemoApp/ and named it axis.html.

5. Copy all the Axis Servlet declarations and mappings from axis/WEB-INF/web.xml and add them to DemoApp’s web.xml.

6. Restart Tomcat and test Axis using the URL like this: http://localhost:8080/DemoApp/axis.html

 Until now, Web services have mainly been used to integrate application servers and databases behind corporate firewalls. However, powerful new services are becoming available over the public Internet as well. Companies such as salesforce.com, Grand Central Communications, eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and XMethods have deployed sophisticated service-oriented architectures (SOAs) that are sold either by subscription or as part of their existing product offering.

Read the full article at : http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=47668&DE=1.