I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The recently created Web Tools Platform Project extends Eclipse with a set of open source Web service development tools and APIs. This talk gives an overview of the project and focuses on its Web services support. The project is divided into two subprojects: Web Standard Tools and J2EE Standard Tools. The Web Standard Tools subproject contains support for XML Web Services, including tools based on standards defined by W3C, Oasis, WS-I, and others. The J2EE Standard Tools subproject contains support for standards defined by JCP, such as JAX-RPC and JSR-109, and for reference implementations of these standards, such as Apache Axis. The project contains both a set of tools for Web service developers and a set of APIs for Web service tool creators. The talk includes a demonstration of the tools.

The Basic Business License Web-based application of the District of Columbia enables the processing and issuance of business licenses. The licenses are issued according to business activity and transformed into business endorsement categories. In this project, SDDM Technology participated in the development of an n-tier application. The SDDM Technology team was responsible for the business logic and the data access tiers. The team applied Microsoft's .NET technology to develop the business rules. ADO.NET was used in conjunction with Oracle packages to access and manipulate data from the data tier (Oracle database). Data was requested from and passed to the Presentation Layer (Java technology) using SOAP/XML. In short, the District of Columbia business license problem was resolved using service-oriented architecture and Web services, taking advantage of the available technologies.

Refresh Software is one of the industry's leading CMS vendors, offering a unique Core Content Management approach. The company's flagship product, SiteRefresh, promotes a decoupled component-based enterprise architecture, permitting it to be easily deployed in existing environments. This case study follows the recent transformation of SiteRefresh from an integrated application to a component in a services-oriented architecture. Focusing on the engineering aspects, the presentation will cover the architecture of the product, the design choices and decisions, and implementation techniques. Business drivers, risks, planning, staffing, and engineering effort will also be discussed. The initiative should be substantially complete by the date of the conference, allowing the session to conclude with a postmortem analysis of the Web services effort.

After years of hype and seemingly few deployments, this session highlights several real-world examples from today's leading enterprises implementing transaction-based Web services. The session answers critical questions for enterprises investigating Web services of their own, including: What are the major players really doing? What standards are considered practical for use? What architectural and infrastructure considerations are critical for success? Focusing on four detailed, real-world organizational examples from planning, development, testing, deployment, and finally from operational management, this session is a practical field guide to today's non-trivial Web service deployments and those steps taken to ensure their success.

CPI is an integrated Correction, Prevention, and Improvement Tracking System for all job-related problems encountered by Halliburton personnel. The system provides a Web interface to let an employee report a problem from anywhere on the field, and tracks the problem during its various stages in the back-end workflow and ultimately captures and reports the resolution. It is built on the J2EE platform using a combination of multiple Web services for its infrastructure. Data is managed from multiple data sources including SAP, operational data stores, legacy systems, and LDAP services, all using independent Web services. The strengths of this system are derived from its unique integrated process model and data management architecture based on Web services. This session describes the vision, the core technologies, key features, and the challenges faced in building this system.

One aspect of the Department of Defense's vision for net-centric operations and warfare is composing and orchestrating mission capability packages from various disparate and geographically dispersed Web services into mission-oriented applications as required by the operational situation. This allows mission-oriented capabilities to be quickly composed in response to new challenges, requirements, or demands. In other words, operational agility. Until recently orchestrating these fine-grained services together into coherent course-grained solutions required non standard methods and procedures that were generally not interoperable with other organizations. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) mitigates the issue of interoperability by providing a set of constructs, based on XML, that can be used to define the semantics of how processes communicate and exchange data, control the flow of data from one service to another, and the order in which to invoke services.

Web services hold great promise for exposing functionality to the outside world. They allow organizations to quickly connect disparate systems in a platform-neutral manner. The real challenge occurs when Web services need to address the underlying complexity and inflexibility of the systems they connect together. While Web services provide an interface to connect systems ? there remains the increasing complexity of the applications you have built, and are currently building, which sits behind those interfaces.1060 NetKernel applies the underlying architectural principles of the Web and Web services together with Unix-like scheduling and pipelines to provide radical flexibility and improved simplicity by providing a platform to apply service-oriented architecture throughout your application environment. Developed through the exploration of some of the most complex Internet commerce systems, 1060 NetKernel will allow you to apply service oriented abstraction to any application, component, or service.

Salesforce.com's sforce Web services API features one of the most innovative and widely used enterprise class Web services. In designing this Web service, the developers had to navigate several challenging issues in how best to create an effective Web service that did not sacrifice capability or simplicity. Learn about the design patterns and techniques developed for this service, and how they might be useful in the development of your widely deployed and sophisticated Web services.

This session teaches developers how to get up and running in the field of Web services. The talk begins with an overview of Web services, highlighting their purpose and benefits. Along the way, developers will learn the strengths and weaknesses of SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST, the three major Web services protocols. After laying a theoretical foundation, the talk continues on to design considerations in real-life Web services. Using the eBay API as a case study, you'll see the factors a company needs to consider when deploying a Web service interface and how that influences their offerings. Finally, developers will learn how to implement Web services clients using PHP to access the eBay platform.