designing a service

I am learning webservices. Ok My company for all intensive purposes in manually performing some B2B funcionality.

I am trying to sell them the idea of a soap based service for thier B2B processing.

I know:
All the details that need to be passed in a soap message.

what pieces must be encrytped.

that some signature must be added to verify that the person sending the soap request is authorized.

I need to attach images to the soap request as part of the processing.

What I do not have a clue is where to proceede from here.
Guidance please

Hi,
If you want to know if Web Services can fit your needs, the answer is yes, according to what you explained in your post.
There are several items in WS, such s WS-Security, encryption, binary attachments (SAAJ), and so forth...

If you want to obtain clues about how to design a web service for a b2b solution, I'm not sure such a generic question can be answered in a forum. But if you have any specific question, go ahead.

This is one of the most intimiating a learning expriences I have had in a very long time. I want to keep from going down the wrong path.

QUESTION)I know what the buisness requirements would be, for a valid soap message. So It makes sense for me to start by building a progam, that will create a soap message, send the soap message some where that trigger some action. Then figure you how what I need to do to register my service somewhere on my network.

YES/NO???

QUESTION)I can easily chose to send my soap message to a servlet over HTTP.
Why would I choose a statless EJB? (I want to use an EJB for the experience but I would need to justify the an ejb container)

QUESTION) Registrys. What are my options? Since my company does not have a commitment to any particular registry implementations. Any recommendtions.

Currently I have written a java application that will create some test soap message, envelope, and body, and I can write that soap message to the file system.

QUESTION) Is there some "SOAP message format" for dummies

Question) in the soap body I add a header and some text. In the example code I used both header and made body elements :

header.addHeaderElement(envelope.createName("manufacturer")).addTextNode("ford");

or
name= SOAPFactory.newInstance().createName("manufacturer");
bodyElement= body.addBodyElement(name);
bodyElement.addTextNode("ford");

what the program generates is:
"<manufacturer xmlns="">ford</manufacturer>"
Why does the xmlns occur here???
Why would I declare a name space?

Very LONG SHOT but hope someone knows. some of the buisnesses calling this busness process have/use IBM mainframes using cobal and RPG. Apparently enabling AS400's or 390's to do HTML requests is very expensive.
Any suggestions on how to enable a remote mainframe contact my service.
The other limitation is that the remote mainframe has very limited programmer staff and almost none of it has java exprience.

Ok after doing some more learning.
If I know the types of information, and transport security rules of the data I need to perform my buisness process.

is JAX-RPC a magic bullet that will allow me to specify the data and the rules by which my data must go over the wire, and then have JAX-RPC build the soap message for me?

Yes, Jax-RPC will build the SOAP message for you, according to a bunch of parameters you have to specify (encoding style for instance). You can do it designing a WSDL and then generating the JAX-RPC client.
For the data itself, your XML payload can come with a XSD schema to specify its content and some values.