Ethan Cerami is a Senior Software Engineer at the Center for Computational Biology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and an adjunct faculty in the Department of Computer Science at New York University. He is the author of Web Services Essentials (O'Reilly), and is currently hard at work on "XML for Bioinformatics" (O'Reilly).

Dedication;
Preface;
Audience;
Organization;
Conventions Used in This Book;
Comments and Questions;
Acknowledgments;
Introduction to Web Services;
Chapter 1: Introduction;
1.1 Introduction to Web Services;
1.2 Web Service Architecture;
1.3 XML Messaging;
1.4 Service Description: WSDL;
1.5 Service Discovery: UDDI;
1.6 Service Transport;
1.7 Security Considerations;
1.8 All Together Now;
1.9 Standards and Coherence;
XML-RPC;
Chapter 2: XML-RPC Essentials;
2.1 XML-RPC Overview;
2.2 Why XML-RPC?;
2.3 XML-RPC Technical Overview;
2.4 Developing with XML-RPC;
2.5 Beyond Simple Calls;
SOAP;
Chapter 3: SOAP Essentials;
3.1 SOAP 101;
3.2 The SOAP Message;
3.3 SOAP Encoding;
3.4 SOAP via HTTP;
3.5 SOAP and the W3C;
3.6 SOAP Implementations;
Chapter 4: Apache SOAP Quick Start;
4.1 Installing Apache SOAP;
4.2 Hello, SOAP!;
4.3 Deploying SOAP Services;
4.4 The TcpTunnelGui Tool;
4.5 Web Resources;
Chapter 5: Programming Apache SOAP;
5.1 Working with Arrays;
5.2 Working with JavaBeans;
5.3 Working with Literal XML Documents;
5.4 Handling SOAP Faults;
5.5 Maintaining Session State;
WSDL;
Chapter 6: WSDL Essentials;
6.1 The WSDL Specification;
6.2 Basic WSDL Example: HelloService.wsdl;
6.3 WSDL Invocation Tools, Part I;
6.4 Basic WSDL Example: XMethods eBay Price Watcher Service;
6.5 WSDL Invocation Tools, Part II;
6.6 Automatically Generating WSDL Files;
6.7 XML Schema Data Typing;
UDDI;
Chapter 7: UDDI Essentials;
7.1 Introduction to UDDI;
7.2 Why UDDI?;
7.3 UDDI Technical Overview;
7.4 UDDI Data Model;
7.5 Searching UDDI;
7.6 Publishing to UDDI;
7.7 UDDI Implementations;
7.8 Web Resources;
Chapter 8: UDDI Inquiry API: Quick Reference;
8.1 The UDDI Inquiry API;
8.2 Find Qualifiers;
Chapter 9: UDDI 4J;
9.1 Getting Started;
9.2 Finding and Retrieving UDDI Data;
9.3 Publishing UDDI Data;
9.4 UDDI4J Quick Reference API;
Glossary;
Colophon;

As a developer new to Web Services, how do you make sense of this emerging framework so you can start writing your own services today? This concise book gives programmers both a concrete introduction and a handy reference to XML web services, first by explaining the foundations of this new breed of distributed services, and then by demonstrating quick ways to create services with open-source Java tools.Web Services make it possible for diverse applications to discover each other and exchange data seamlessly via the Internet. For instance, programs written in Java and running on Solaris can find and call code written in C-sharp that run on Windows XP, or programs written in Perl that run on Linux, without any concern about the details of how that service is implemented. A common set of Web Services is at the core of Microsoft's new .NET strategy, Sun Microsystems's Sun One Platform, and the W3C's XML Protocol Activity Group.
In this book, author Ethan Cerami explores four key emerging technologies: XML Remote Procedure Calls (XML-RPC) - SOAP - The foundation for most commercial Web Services development - Universal Discovery, Description and Integration (UDDI) - Web Services Description Language (WSDL). For each of these topics, Web Services Essentials provides a quick overview, Java tutorials with sample code, samples of the XML documents underlying the service, and explanations of freely-available Java APIs. Cerami also includes a guide to the current state of Web Services, pointers to open-source tools and a comprehensive glossary of terms.
If you want to break through the Web Services hype and find useful information on these evolving technologies, look no further than Web Services Essentials.