Application Server 10g Release 10.1.3 Now Live

The latest release of Oracle Application Server just went live a couple of days ago.  
Release 10.1.3 has a whole bunch of
new features and "must haves", the list is too long to go into here, take a look at a look at
OTN for more details.

Along with App Server 10.1.3 comes the shiny new release of
JDeveloper 10.1.3 which is also chock full of
new stuff.

When developing a web service OC4J always generates a little wrapper to allow you to test the service.  This has now been improved in 10.1.3 to allow you to preview the soap message that will be sent before actually invoking the service.

For example I have a simple "Hello World" web service that produces the following test screen.

This screen gives me access to the WSDL as well as an input form for the service.  Selecting the hello method gives me another screen, the input form.

I fill in the parameter and I now get a preview of the SOAP message before submitting it and viewing the response.

All this is very useful when building and debugging your own web services.  One of the options in Web Service generation is to produce WSIF bindings.  I am just starting to explore how this can make WSIF generation for BPEL easier.  A topic for a later blog.