Have a look over the
Web Services FAQ; it also has a
books section.
Originally posted by Dan Murphy:
What I'm looking for is a book that is up-to-date and covers practical WS development for experienced Java developers, but assumes no prior knowledge of web services?
Those are difficult requirements. The web services space is currently split between the
SOAP web service and RESTful web service arenas (not to mention POX (Plain old XML) over HTTP). SOAP web services currently have a wider established base and lots of add-on Business Process related protocols, but RESTful web services are gaining acceptance for pre-dominantly lighter-weight requirements. For SOAP web services the Java enterprise APIs are split between JAX-RPC for existing
J2EE deployments and JAX-WS for new Java EE deployment, not to mention all the variations that are introduced by Axis, Axis 2, Apache CXF, Spring Web Services etc. For RESTful web services Restlet is available and JSR-311 (Jersey) is being specified for potential inclusion in Java EE 6; some initial support for RESTful web services is available in JAX-WS.
Web services tend to be architectural in nature as they were conceived to support messaging between otherwise incompatible systems; they are supposed to operate on a higher level of abstraction than "distributed components". Web services have only more recently been used in a non-architectural role for RIA support; this niche is usually filled by POX over HTTP, JSON over HTTP, or RESTful web services, less often by SOAP web services.
You may also be interested in this
topic.
[ February 03, 2008: Message edited by: Peer Reynders ]