Hello Chin,
To be honest I didn't use many tutorials. I read the recommended texts (primarily the RMH book) and just looked at the JavaDoc of the various APIs. As I had seen on here that people were recommending to do the web services related chapters of the J2EE 1.4 tutorial I started looking at that but I only did the first JAX-RPC chapter. I found that I wasn't learning much as it basically takes the form of:
Compile completed codeBuild deployable moduleRun program I thought the tutorial didn't explain enough about what the code was doing so I didn't bother using it after that. Instead, I just stuck to the RMH book which goes into more detail, experimented with my own simple programs and referred to the JavaDoc when I wanted to know more. Besides that the tutorial requires you to download and install Sun's application server and the build and deploy steps are all Sun-centric. It's good that it doesn't cost anything but in my opinion it would be better for them to keep the scripts etc. vendor neutral and let the developer deploy it using the tools he or she is familiar with, which would be of more benefit to them in the long run.
As for the specifications, I only read the Basic Profile 1.0 in full. I only used the SOAP and WSDL specs as a reference when I wanted to know more about the topics the RMH book was teaching me.
Regarding tools I just wrote simple programs to test the javax.xml.* APIs. in the Eclipse
IDE. I don't think I actually deployed a web service because I had some experience of this before. I did play around with the WSDL2Java and Java2WSDL tools, though and also looked at the WSDL I created when deploying real web services in the past. It's good to look at real examples and see how they compare to those in the books.
Regards
Steve
[ March 10, 2008: Message edited by: Steve Lock ]