Virtual Identity Dialogue

As part of a new whitepaper and demo I'm building for OVD - I needed to
build a sample Web Service. I have built many Web Services before but I
want to say that creating them in JDeveloper was definitely the easiest.



You create your Java class (or you can create them from WSDL) and then
run the wizard. Finally you can deploy to a number of different
application servers, though I am using the included OC4J (aka Oracle Application Server) container.



What I thought was particularly cool and useful:



1 - OC4J allows you to test your Web Services (including SOAP) from a Web Browser without needing to create a proxy client.



2 - You can generate your Web Services with both a SOAP and REST
interface. I really like this and highly recommend that unless you
generate both interfaces, in particular since it will "auto-document"
the REST interface as well as provide a WSDL file for SOAP clients. The
reason why I recommend this is because it maximizes the number of ways
clients can use your service in particular if you want to have an AJAX
based application. REST interfaces are much easier to build with REST
services than SOAP.



I used this article to help get me started.