Chapter 2. Getting started with web services
This chapter covers
- XML, SOAP and WSDL basics
- Web services with Apache Axis
- Choices in service design
Chapter 1 described why and how SOA security is different from traditional application security. In this chapter, we are going to learn some of the foundational technical details of SOA, namely web services and SOAP.
Web services provide the most popular approach for implementing SOA. SOAP is the most-supported protocol in web services. It should be no surprise then that security solutions are more widely researched, developed, and implemented for SOAP-based web services. The principles behind the techniques for SOAP security hold good for wider SOA security as well, and the first two parts of this book will almost exclusively assume SOAP-based web services. Therefore, you need to have a good understanding of SOAP and other basic technologies that SOAP relies on to follow this book.