Java Reference
In-Depth Information
1 Introduction
Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Describe basic elements of a Web Service application
2. Compare and contrast the purposes of Web and Web Service applications
3. Describe the benefits of Web Services
4. Write a simple Web Service application using Java Development Kit (JDK) 6 or
later
5.
Verify and test a Web Service application
In the early days of the Internet, Web applications delivered static webpages via HTML.
Certainly, the development of websites was simpler; however, static content can quickly
become outdated; thus, the content management of a website is important.
Figure 1-1
Early Web applications
In order to provide dynamic content to Web users, 2-tier web applications were realized
with the introduction of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which retrieves content
from external data resources, such as a database. CGI acts as a client in the traditional
client-server architecture. A CGI script processes the request and returns the result to the
Web server. The server then formats the contents in HTML and returns to the browser for
display.
