T320 Ebusiness Technologies Blog

Block 3 links: SOA, WSDL, SOAP, REST, UDDI etc

Some useful links for Block 3:
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Technical problems with Eclipse for Block 3

I finished the TMA (hooray) but not without some Herculean effort and wasted time spent wrestling with technical problems with Eclipse. So here are the problems and answers I found – may it save someone else some much needed time as the deadline approaches!
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WSDL: Like memorising the phone book

What with XML, SOAP and WSDL documents all using XML and XML Schema, they seem so alike. Starting to learn them by reading about them is like trying to memorise the phone book: I really need to get on with the practical activities to make some more sense of this. Thankfully (I think) there are many of these, but there isn’t much time for the TMA! I hope the reason WSDL is confusing is because it’s the first of the set that I’m reading about. The WSDL unit summary reminds me ‘WSDL is the language for describing web services so that they can be accessed and used by clients, either manually or automatically’… Hold that thought!

Made my first web service!

I followed the instructions from the first activity in Block 3, clicked Finish to generate my web service in Eclipse, waited, waited, and got… a 404 Not Found page – aaargh! Had to go out almost immediately, but checked again when I got back and noticed port numbers being mentioned. So I tried switching off the Windows firewall, and hooray! My first web service!! It asked me my name and said Hello to me. (Ok so that part was not a surprise, but it was so great to see it working!)

On checking it out, I noticed all kinds of other files had been generated: WSDL, metadata, Java classes and libraries, and more – I guess that’s the rest of Block 3 then…