The Web Services Build Specification Framework
Previous articles in this series put forward best practices for building document-style web services with the Apache Axis engine. Actual load testing and performance results on the proposed web services architecture were also published to indicate the architecture's ability to handle the load and to demonstrate its robustness. This article documents the build process to automate the best practices defined in those earlier articles for document-literal style web services.
Overall Framework Concept
Consider web services as just a packaging or distribution step to expose a given business module. In theory, the web services layer can be replaced seamlessly with any other distributed technology (RMI, CORBA, DCOM, and so on).
NOTE
This build framework provides code only for web services technology as the distributed technology layer.
All business modules are standalone components containing logic to perform a business task whose single business function uses an XML API or interface, taking XML input and returning an XML string as the result. This business module can be run entirely from the command line.
The web services build specification framework is given a pointer to the business module, and appropriate property settings are configured. The framework then packages the business module as a document-literal style web service. This framework allows you to create web services for multiple business components for a given project.