Press Release
February 25, 2002
Enter the Brave New World of Web Services with O'Reilly's Web Services Essentials
Sebastopol, CA-Web services, new darling of the technology media, still
escapes concrete definition. Ethan Cerami, author of the just-released
Web Services
Essentials (O'Reilly, US $29.95), is firm about his
definition, however: "At a minimum, a web service is any piece of
software that makes itself available over the Internet and uses a
standardized XML messaging system. Web services currently run a wide
gamut from news syndication and stock-market data to weather reports
and package-tracking systems."
Web services are being used in a growing variety of network programming
and information publishing situations. Web services are also at the
core of Microsoft's new .NET strategy, Sun Microsystems's Sun One
Platform, and the W3C's XML Protocol Activity Group. A Web Services
Interoperability Organization has just been formed. Pundits are touting
the potential of web services software, and predicting that sales are
poised to explode. With so much attention focused on this new breed of
distributed services, web developers are eagerly entering the virtual
arena.
Cerami is already an old hand at this emerging technology. "I think web
services represent an important evolutionary step in building
distributed applications," says Cerami. "So, what is really new about
web services? The answer is XML. XML lies at the core of web services,
and provides a common language for describing Remote Procedure Calls,
web services, and web service directories. Prior to XML, one could
share data among different applications, but XML makes this so much
easier to do. In the same vein, one can share services and code without
web services, but XML makes it easier to do these as well. By
standardizing on XML, different applications can more easily talk to
one another, and this makes software a whole lot more interesting."
Web services represent an evolving set of standards that will enable
diverse and occasionally obstreporous applications to more easily
discover each other and seamlessly exchange data via the Internet. For
instance, programs written in Java and running on Solaris can find and
call code written in C# 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. 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? Web Services Essentials arms programmers with
both a concise, concrete introduction, and a handy reference to XML web
services, first by explaining the foundations and capabilities, and
then by demonstrating quick ways to create services with open-source
Java tools.
In Web Services Essentials, author Ethan Cerami explores four key
emerging technologies and how they fit together in the web services
landscape: XML Remote Procedure Calls (XML-RPC), SOAP (the foundation
for most commercial web services development), Universal Discovery,
Description and Integration (UDDI), and Web Services Description
Language (WSDL). The book provides a quick overview of each topic, Java
tutorials with sample code, samples of the underlying XML documents,
and explanations of freely-available Java APIs. Cerami includes a guide
to the current state of web services, pointers to open-source tools,
and a comprehensive glossary of terms. Cerami also demonstrates the
core protocols, showing developers how they interact and how best to
apply them to particular web service situations. Demonstrations are
written primarily in Java, with other languages used to demonstrate
interoperability. Web Services Essentials is the only book to cover
web services from a vendor-neutral perspective.
Web Services Essentials meets a pressing need for resources that show
how the many different parts of the web services puzzle fit together,
and gives developers a clearer view of the emerging technology. This
book will get you started building web services quickly by providing
big picture context as well as real coding examples in a single volume.
"Web services gets too much hype these days," concludes Cerami. "This
book doesn't make any grand claims about web services. Rather, it shows
what web services can do today. As such, I hope it gives readers an
idea of the field, and provides some hints on where it may go in the
future."
Additional resources:
Web Services
Essentials
Distributed Applications with XML-RPC, SOAP, UDDI & WSDL
By Ethan Cerami
February 2002
0-596-00224-6, Order Number: 2246
288 pages, $29.95 (US), $44.95 (CA)
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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