Creating a Java based web service

Question

Hello,

I have a very basic Java based web service requirement. Requirement is very simple, pass some String parameters, save them to database and generate a response ("success", "failed"). There is also a case where I need to return simple XML representation (SOAP message) of a simple Object:

<person>
 <name>the name</name>
 <address>the name</address>
......
</person>

Our current environment is Windows, Apache Tomcat 5, SQL Server. I'm new to web services so I'm trying to figure out what technologies I could use to make this work. For example:

1. Do I really need Apache Axis 2 to implement this or would it be overkill?

2. I saw a tutorial online where all that was needed to create web service was Eclipse, Lomboz plugin for Eclipse and Apache Tomcat. Will I still need Apache Axis2 if I take this route?

3. Is it possible for Tomcat to process web service requests messages or do I need third party libraries?

I guess I'm looking for the easiest way to implement this. Thank you.

Answer 1

A web framework would make this much easier (and actually maintainable), but you could just write a raw servlet to handle requests. You'll want to use an XML object serialization method, though, or at the very least an xml parsing library.

Answer 2

Do you actually need SOAP support? If you do, Axis is probably your best bet. Otherwise, I'd take a look at Jersey.

Answer 3

If it will be as simple as you have mentioned, why don't you look at RESTful Web Services? You can specify your resource calls through a GET, POST, DELETE or PUT HTTP methods.

There's a blog tutorial on how to achieve this. It also shows you how you can return JSON strings/XML (depending on what you want).