Experiences

The steps involved in writing the Web Service Client will be as follows: a) Locate the service description in the form of WSDL for the web service in question. (Actually the first step is to search UDDI for the services. I am excluding this step here to simplify the process ) b) Once we have the WSDL document, most of the client code is auto-generated using the wsimport tool. c)   Run the client and invoke the web service. Now I will demonstrate the steps to write a Web Service client in Java using Eclipse IDE. This web service client is invoking the web services available at the url  "http://www.webservicex.net ”         1)       Go to the url : http://www.webservicex.net/ws/default.aspx              2)       Choose the web service you want to write the client for. I have chosen Computer Unit converter, which gi...

As the name implies, a web service is a "service available on web". The main difference between a web application (which may also be called as a service available on web) and a Web service is that the website/web application is meant for humans as end users whereas a web service is meant for another application. A web service basically services the needs of an application running on another server which is network accessible.  The main advantage of Web Service is Interoperability, which means it is not any technology or platform specific. This means that a C# application running on  an Application Server A on a Windows machine can request for a web service written in Java and running on an Application Server B on a Linux machine. It may also happen that the web service host is an Application Server whereas the web service client is a mobile device having a network access to the host. Web Services are mainly of two types: SOAP based (JAX-WS specifi...