I’m not sure why I haven’t ventured into the realm of web services before this week. It probably has a lot to do with time (or lack thereof) and the type of projects I’ve worked on. But, I finally got my feet wet this week. My employer asked me to create a web service that publishes a service that we currently offer via a JSP web application. As I found out, the back-end logic is unnecessarily complex. To complicate matters the app is written using old-style JSP that is inundated with scriptlets and scattered across many smaller pages which are included based on if-then logic within the scriptlets. Yeah, it’s a mess. So, I read up on XML Schema and WSDL formats and created a WSDL. I know a lot of frameworks create the WSDL for you based on your objects, but I’ve heard that the WSDL-first approach is better for interoperability across platforms. I used Apache Axis as the WS framework because that’s what our project already used to consume web services, I just found out we’re switching from Tomcat to WebLogic and using the WebLogic web service framework. Nice. Good thing I used the WSDL-first approach. Should be a snap to convert. We’ll see.