I just got hit with a project that seems like it could use web services. Basically a survey tool that can operate standalone (a
Java app) and can sync back to a web server to send survey responses and download more questions. Initially only Windows clients are required, but the ability to expand to others like PDAs would be a nice plus.
Problem is, other than working through a few examples a while back I'm pretty new to web services. And of course I have to have some kind of rough architectural proposal together by COB tomorrow (4/22). I'm looking at a Java client, web based admin,
servlets, and a backend DB. Not planning to use EJBs for this. I have a couple of questions right now though if anyone can help.
1) Security - I assume using HTTP as the transport I can use SSL - correct? I'm going to look into WS-Security too, but so far it looks like it's mainly for authentication, and there aren't many (any?) complete implementations available. I think for my rather simple needs I can "roll my own" for authentication if need be. Any other suggestions?
2) Libraries - My first thought was JWSDP, but does it (at least 1.5) only work in certain containers? That's the impression I get from Sun's pages about it. They point you to a special version of
Tomcat and two of their commercial offerings. What is there to JWSDP other than a collection of libraries and a few tools that would make it container specific? I'm also looking at Axis - should it work with any container?
Thanks for any and all comments!
Eddie
