It’s St. Patrick's Day week.  May the luck of Irish be with you!  As my father (who was very Irish) used to tell me, everyone is Irish on St. Patty's Day.

Has your company joined the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) bandwagon?  If so, you have probably become very familiar with the WS-* technologies to include XML, namespaces, Schema, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, etc.  I'll call this the "heavy stack" for SOAP-based Web service (service provider) and Web service client (consumer) development.  This stack provides all the standards and technologies for interoperable SOA.  While platform agnostic, many have found SOAP-based Web services difficult to learn and the XML message structure cumbersome and unnecessary for many applications - thus my "heavy" adjective.

As an alternative to SOAP-based Web services, many have started to explore REST-based, or RESTful, Web services.  In fact, many of the familiar Internet giants (Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, etc.) provide RESTful Web services.  Some have abandoned SOAP-based Web services in favor of RESTful services!  Why?  RESTful services are considered "lighter."  That is easier to learn and data exchange that does not have to be as cumbersome/heavy.  RESTful Web services use the conventions that underlie the World Wide Web - namely HTTP - and any data exchange format you would like - to include plain text, CSV, JSON and even XML if you would like.

JAX-RS is the relatively recent Java EE specification and API for dealing with RESTful Web services in Java.  If you would like to learn more about JAX-RS and RESTful Web services, please come join my 2 hour Web seminar on April 15th.  This is a free seminar and is conducted over the Web so you can learn at home or the office (you don't even have to be dressed - just don't share that with me J ).  To sign up for this Web seminar, click the link at the bottom of this post.  If you are looking to learn more about both SOAP and RESTful Web service and Web service client development, consider taking Intertech's Complete Java Web Service class.

Free RESTful Web Services in Java seminar:  http://www.intertech.com/resource/Briefing.aspx?EventID=210