What happens when the hype of Web services meets the increasingly popular and
ever-changing world of wireless computing? Most likely, confusion and
disillusionment. In this two-part article, we'll explore the uncharted waters
of wireless Web services. We'll use the J2ME platform for developing our Web
service clients and access remote services on the Internet using standardized
industry protocols. In this first article, we'll examine XML-RPC, a simple,
lightweight mechanism for invoking remote services with XML. The second
article will compare and contrast XML-RPC with SOAP, a more robust,
sophisticated, and heavier solution for invoking remote services with XML.
The Wireless World
A Web service is a coarse-grained interface to one or more business services
that is invocable across a network. With a wireless network, this invocation
process becomes more complicated. ... (more)
Last month in Part I (WSJ Vol. 2 Issue 1) we discussed J2ME and accessing Web
services from wireless devices using the XML-RPC protocol. In this article,
we will consider SOAP as a vehicle for accessing Web services from wireless
devices, comparing and contrast-ing it with XML-RPC. Our sample application
will again be a J2ME midlet, however, we will use EnhydraME's kSOAP rather
than kXML-RPC to provide the protocol's implementation.
Overview of SOAP
The Simple Object Access Protocol is, according to the 1.1 specification, "a
lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a de... (more)