Web Services for Beginners (NetBeans is our friend!)

After a few days of J2EE 1.4 Tutorial on XML, DTD, Dom and XSLT I finally arrived at the “Building Web Services with JAX-RCP” chapter. I was very enthusiastic about it and I went through the entire chapter following all the steps. For my disappointment, at the end of the chapter, I realized I could not build a Web Service myself! And here is the difficulty: am I suppose to know how to write all those configuration files? The tutorial does not explain how to do that, because the examples already provide all those files. I just had to build, deploy and run.

I went Google about building up a Web Service from scratch and I found the tutorial Quick-Start Guide for Web Services which explain how to write a Web Service and a Client using NetBeans. If you’re a beginner you’ll be happy to see that after following this tutorial you actually have a Web Service up and running and a client that accesses it. This tutorial assumes you’re using NetBeans 4.1, so if you’re using NetBeans 5.0 make sure you have the latest updates from Update Center (Tools Menu), otherwise it will give errors when you try to add the service to the registry or when you try to create a client (the latest will actually warn you to get the latest updates). The thing about this article is that it teaches you to build a Web Service using the NetBeans wizard. And my questions are: Is this the best way to do it? Is this the way developers should do it professionally? What if I want to do it using Eclipse? I would like to find more resources about building up Web Services including writing the configuration files part. I am open to suggestions. 🙂