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December 07, 2002
Eclipse
While I was playing with AXIS today, the tutorial mentioned Eclipse. Eclipse is an open extensible IDE developed by IBM. The project is open source. There's even a OS X version (latest release) available. I downloaded it, but haven't had time to play with it yet. I'll discuss it more later, if its worthwhile. IN the meantime, there's a white paper available that gives and overview.
One thing I am aware of is that Eclipse will perform some of the same functions as Xdoclet in preparing EJBs. Xdoclet is for those of us who like command lines, emacs, and build tools like ant. IDEs are for GUI types. Take your pick.
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Using SOAP with EJBs
I spent a few hours today playing around with Axis, the Apache Software Foundation web services tool. One of the things I wanted to do was to get a SOAP interface to some EJBs running on jBOSS. There's a half done tutorial at the jBOSS site, but there are no examples in it yet. Google led me to a great little tutorial on Axis and, in part III, jBOSS. I recommend starting with part I and working your way through it. It says, BTW, that you need Java 1.4, but I found that 1.3 worked just fine. One of the things you get from using SOAP with EJBs is a workable .NET interface to your J2EE apps.
One of the things I did get from the jBOSS tutorial was a great little definition of web services. Web services are self-contained pieces of code that have three distinguishing properties:
- They communicate in an interoperable XML protocol, such as SOAP.
- They describe themselves in an interoperable XML meta-format, such as WSDL.
- They are able to federate globally through XML based registry services, such as UDDI.
I like that its not defined in terms of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, but rather in terms of the overall functionality, with those three things given as examples. For example, I think you could substitute Google and WSIL for UDDI and still have an XML based registry service that allows services to federate.