Web services and SOAP

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is present in probably 97.32 percent (an educated guess) of all the web service-related products available today, although it isn't mandatory to assemble a service. As it plays such an important role to integrate systems, let's take a look at how this is accomplished using WebLogic Server 12c.

To illustrate the usage of SOAP, we will expose a service from the Theater project that makes a seat reservation. This web service will be consumed by the Store project once the user has decided which and how many of each seat type he/she wants for a specific exhibition.

The reservation web service

To create and expose a web service, we just need to annotate a POJO class with javax.jws.WebService. By default, all public methods of the class are automatically exposed as operations.

We're going to create a service in the Theater project that will receive a reservation request and pass it to the partner's system to register it. Then, we subtract...