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Sample Scenario

The following scenario is an example of how the Java APIs for XML might be used and how they work together. Part of the richness of the Java APIs for XML is that in many cases they offer alternate ways of doing something and thus let you tailor your code to meet individual needs. This section will point out some instances in which an alternate API could have been used and will also give the reasons why one API or the other might be a better choice.

Scenario

Suppose that the owner of a chain of coffee houses, called The Coffee Break, wants to expand by selling coffee online. He instructs his business manager to find some new coffee suppliers, get their wholesale prices, and then arrange for orders to be placed as the need arises. The Coffee Break can analyze the prices and decide which new coffees it wants to carry and which companies it wants to buy them from.

Discovering New Distributors

The business manager assigns the task of finding potential new sources of coffee to the company's software engineer. She decides that the best way to locate new coffee suppliers is to search a Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registry, where The Coffee Break has already registered itself.

The engineer uses JAXR to send a query searching for wholesale coffee suppliers. The JAXR implementation uses JAXM behind the scenes to send the query to the registry, but this is totally transparent to the engineer.

The UDDI registry will receive the query and apply the search criteria transmitted in the JAXR code to the information it has about the organizations registered with it. When the search is completed, the registry will send back information on how to contact the wholesale coffee distributors that met the specified criteria. Although the registry uses JAXM behind the scenes to transmit the information, the response the engineer gets back is JAXR code.

Requesting Price Lists

The engineer's next step is to request price lists from each of the coffee distributors. She has obtained a WSDL description for each one, which tells her the procedure to call to get prices and also the URI where the request is to be sent. Her code makes the appropriate remote procedure calls using JAX-RPC API and gets back the responses from the distributors. The Coffee Break has been doing business with one distributor for a long time and has made arrangements with it to exchange JAXM messages using agreed-upon XML schemas. Therefore, for this distributor, the engineer's code uses JAXM API to request current prices, and the distributor returns the price list in a JAXM message.

Comparing Prices and Ordering Coffees

Upon receiving the response to her request for prices, the engineer processes the price lists using SAX. She uses SAX rather than DOM because for simply comparing prices, it is more efficient. (To modify the price list, she would have needed to use DOM.) After her application gets the prices quoted by the different vendors, it compares them and displays the results.

When the owner and business manager decide which suppliers to do business with, based on the engineer's price comparisons, they are ready to send orders to the suppliers. The orders to new distributors are sent via JAX-RPC; orders to the established distributor are sent via JAXM. Each supplier, whether using JAX-RPC or JAXM, will respond by sending a confirmation with the order number and shipping date.

Selling Coffees on the Internet

Meanwhile, The Coffee Break has been preparing for its expanded coffee line. It will need to publish a price list/order form in HTML for its Web site. But before that can be done, the company needs to determine what prices it will charge. The engineer writes an application that will multiply each wholesale price by 135% to arrive at the price that The Coffee Break will charge. With a few modifications, the list of retail prices will become the online order form.

The engineer uses JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology to create an HTML order form that customers can use to order coffee online. From the JSP page, she gets the name and price of each coffee, and then she inserts them into an HTML table on the JSP page. The customer enters the quantity of each coffee desired and clicks the "Submit" button to send the order.

Conclusion

Although this scenario is simplified for the sake of brevity, it illustrates how XML technologies can be used in the world of Web services. With the availability of the Java APIs for XML and the J2EE platform, creating Web services and writing applications that use them have both gotten easier.

Chapter 18 demonstrates a simple implementation of this scenario.

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This tutorial contains information on the 1.0 version of the Java Web Services Developer Pack.

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