Get to speed with the Web Service Toolkit for JBuilder

Jan 13, 2002

Borland JBuilder 6 or later
Web Services Toolkit installed

There's a big buzz around web services in the current software development scene. Not matter what operating system or programming language you appear using, everybody is talking about the possibilities and how to implement cool solutions. Some vendors are still fine-tuning their solutions, but fortunately Borland delivers a solid solution for JBuilder developers with the "Web Services Development Environment", or Web Service Toolkit.

The Borland Web Serivce Toolkit was announced in December, 2001. Currently it is in a preview state, but even so, it can be used to production-level development. The toolkit is a free download, and it integrated to JBuilder as an OpenTools add-on.

We used JBuilder 6 Enterprise for testing. Installing the toolkit also adds documentation and the Apache SOAP Toolkit and AXIS beneath JBuilder's installation directory. Unfortunately, the AXIS installation is not exactly complete, so we suggest that you download the latest version (at the writing of this, the Alpha 3 version) from the AXIS site. Other than these kind of tiny glitches, the toolkit is easy to use.

Once you've read the documentation (we really suggest you to do so), you can start to utilize the toolkit's potential. For example, clicking the New button on the toolbar brings up the Object Gallery, which now has a new tab, "Web Services":

With these three icons, much can be done.

For clients as well as servers

By using the toolkit's power, you can build SOAP servers as well as clients to consume other web services. We found this to be rather easy, with the exception of configuring the Tomcat web server for production. For testing, the toolkit automatically configures Tomcat so that testing your custom SOAP servers is a snap.

Other than just supporting the SOAP protocol, the toolkit also allows you to import WSDL files written by others. WSDL file is an XML file that contains the technical details that are needed to call web services anywhere on the Internet. To make things easier for the average Java developer, the Import WSD wizard is able to generate Java classes by parsing the WSDL file, which is similar to for example what Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Borland's Delphi 6 Enterprise are both able to do.

Browsing registries

Web services are great for sure, but how to do find them? The answer is stored inside an UDDI registry, accessible readily from the toolkits interface. Although UDDI is a complex interface to handle programmatically, using an UDDI registry needn't be so. Just start from the Tools menu of JBuilder:

This command opens the Web Services Explorer, shown below:

With this interactive tool a developer can easily locate a public web service provided that it is published in any common registry. For example, browsing the XMethods registry lists dozens of web services to choose from. And once you've selected your favorite service, just let the wizards of the JBuilder Web Service Toolkit generate Java class wrappers for you.

Then, you just need to add application logic, and you are ready to interact with the web service!

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