Solutions in this chapter:

• JWSDP History

• JAXP

• JAXM

• JAX-RPC

• JAXR

• JSSE

• JSTL

• Ant and Tomcat

Introduction

The Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP) is a collection of tools and libraries designed to make the development of Web services in Java as painless as possible. First introduced in January 2002 as an Early Access (EA) release, the JWSDP brings together XML parsers, SOAP support, service containers, and build tools that can be used to create and consume widely distributed services based on XML protocols.

At the time of this writing, the current release is EA2, which contains the following components:

• The JAXP XML processing libraries

• The JAXM XML messaging libraries

• The JAX-RPC XML Remote Procedure Call libraries

• The JAXR libraries for accessing XML registries

• The Java Secure Sockets (JSSE) library

• JSP Standard Tag Libraries

• The Apache/Jakarta Ant build tool

• The Apache/Jakarta Tomcat servlet container

• A simple UDDI registry (WSDP Registry tool)

• The Web Application Deployment tool

You probably noticed that parts of the JWSDP were not written by Sun. In fact, the JWSDP is mostly a collection of existing products; the JWSDP acts to package these tools in a form convenient to download and install. Also, with the JWSDP you know you have versions of the tools that work together, saving a lot of frustration when trying to get some code working.

This book covers the components of the JWSDP in detail. However, in order to make the book something you can actually lift without heavy machinery, some background information has...