News

Wizards of WSDL make Web services magic

• By Rich Seeley
• October 15, 2003

Rick Hightower, CTO at Trivera Technologies LLC (www.triveratech.com), a training and consulting firm helping companies with Web services implementations, said that he's impressed with the wizard technology in IBM's new WSDK 5.1.

These wizards are not just for simplistic tasks, he said; they really get to the meat of Web services development. "They have a UDDI wizard. They also have wizards for creating Web services from a WSDL file," he noted.

The wizards provide developers with a flexible but easy path to Web services development, according to Hightower. "There are several inputs you can give the wizard. Let's say that a partner company gives you a WSDL file. The wizard will generate the client stuff, and for testing you can even generate the server skeleton. So the input is an existing WSDL file and from that [the wizard] is going to generate the Java objects that represent that service."

That use of the WSDL wizard is primarily for setting up to consume a Web service, he added. There is another way of working with the wizard when you develop your own Web services.

As Hightower explained: "You can take any Java object with the wizard and say, 'I want you to make this Java object a Web service.' It will take that Java object and make it a Web service." The same thing can be done with a stateless session bean, he added.

While it may not be the Hogwart's School for Programmers, the IBM developerWorks Web site has more information on the wizards to be found in the WebSphere Software Developer Kit (WSDK) for Web Services 5.1.