Arjen Poutsma

Presentations

Introducing Spring Web Services

2007 was the year of Spring Web Services 1.0. In this session, attendees will learn what this solid product has to offer from its creator. Come to this session to see how how to apply the latest Spring WS release to develop and consume interoperable, document-driven web services.

Spring Web Services is a comprehensive web services stack for developing and consuming SOAP Web services. We will start this session by giving an introduction into Spring-WS, and show how a typical Web service is built. Next, we will show how the client-side WebServiceTemplate can be used to consume this Web service.

We will also discuss some of the new features in the upcoming version of Spring Web Services: version 1.5. We will show how to use the JMS and email transports, how to use the new XML namespaces to easy the configuration, and more.

RESTful Web Services

REST, the REpresentational State Transfer, is the architectural style underlying the HTTP protocol. In the last couple of years, REST has emerged as a compelling and simpler alternative to SOAP/WSDL-based distributed architectures. In this session, Arjen will explain what REST is, how it can be used to build Web Services, and where it makes sense to use.

We will start by giving an overview of REST: where did it come from, how does it work, and how can it be used to build a distributed architecture? Using illustrative examples, we will try to find an answer to these questions.

Next, we look at some of the current frameworks and tools which can be used to build web services. We will look at Spring-MVC and JSR-311 (also known as JAX-RS) on the server-side, and also investigate client-side options, such as the plain HttpURLConnection, and the more mature Commons HttpClient.

In this session, you will learn how build RESTful Web services, and how Spring can help you with this.

WS-DuckTyping with Spring Web Services

One of the most interesting features of languages such as Smalltalk, ObjectiveC, and Ruby is duck typing. This session will show you how you can apply duck typing to Web Services to make them more flexible and less strict.

The basic idea behind duck typing is that if an object walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then the language is happy to treat it as if it a duck. In other words: the object's type is determined by what it can do not by its class.

Web services exchange information, often in a common, interlingual format such as XML. What happens when we apply the principles behind duck typing to Web services?

This talk presents WS-DuckTyping: not a new W3C standard; but rather a way to deal with XML as if it were a duck. We will give a number of practical tips to implement this Anatidaeic development style, including working with XPath to extract information from incoming Web service request, whether and how to validate XML with a schema, and more. Finally, we will show some recent improvements into Spring Web Services which facilitate WS-DuckTyping.