Making Web Services Work

• Familiarity with a programming language
• Understanding of your company's web services need

• Programmers
• Technical Managers
• Web Services Architects

• Exchange XML-tagged information between internal departments or external trading partners by using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Service Description Language (WSDL).
• Write web services applications using Java
• Write web services applications using C#
• Write XSLT programs to transform one XML tree structure to another
• Connect two machines behind the firewall and invoke web services directly over TCP
• Create XML-based messages using SOAP
• Load XML information into a database
• Output data from a database as XML
• Use XML as a way of communicating between two applications

If you think web services means "services delivered over the Web", you need to come to this class!

Web services are much more than that. We define web services as the infrastructure of cross-platform integration using standards. Whether those messages are delivered over the Web or if they are send over a direct TCP or UDP connection inside the firewall, they are still web services.

XML syntax can be used to solve many different data access problems. In fact, XML is at the core of many enterprise integration tools, including the Microsoft .NET servers, IBM WebSphere tools, J2EE Web Services toolkits and and Visual Studio.NET.

The focus for this five-day course is on developing programs that consume or produce XML-tagged datasets for sharing information across organizational boundaries or between departments behind the firewall.

Several technologies work together to make web services work. These are open standards, managed by international standards organizations. In addition to these open standards, programming languages and models are used by various solution providers to allow access to the XML data stream, and the ability to send information from one place to another.

The course covers the following topics:

• XML Schema Definition language (XSD) schemas
• Element and attribute declarations
• User-defined data types (complexType and simpleType)
• Schema re-use (import and include)
• Namespaces
• Programmatic validation considerations
• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT)
• XSLT syntax basics and use
• Macros and scripting
• Rules-based event-driven programming
• The role of XSLT in web services
• XSLT as a programming extension
• Programming models
• Document Object Model (DOM)
• Simple API for XML (SAX2)
• XmlReader and XmlWriter classes in Microsoft's .NET framework
• Sharing data and applications
• TCP, HTTP, and socket programming
• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
• Web Service Description Language (WSDL)
• Web services toolkits
• .NET considerations
• J2EE Web Services Toolkit
• IBM Web Services Toolkit
• Interoperability considerations
• .NET and J2EE
• .NET and IBM
• Emphasis on standards for interoperability

The course focuses on the importance of using standards to assure cross-platform compatibility. The in-depth hands-on workshops assure that you will understand how systems can communicate with these standards so that you will be productive as soon as you get back to your office.

• Web Services Implementation Guide , by Brian Travis and Mae Ozkan
• All course materials presented in class
• Special post-course Web site for students