About JDeveloper and Web Services

Web services consist of a set of messaging protocols and programming standards that expose business functions over the Internet using open standards. A web service is a discrete, reusable software component that is accessed programmatically over the Internet to return a response.

JDeveloper provides powerful tools that help you discover and use existing web services, and develop and deploy new web services. JDeveloper supports developing and deploying web services based on the evolving J2EE web services standards, and web services for deployment to the Oracle SOAP server. JDeveloper can inter-operate with web services developed to Microsoft's .NET architecture to produce stubs, or proxies, to those services.

Using Web Services

You can quickly create a stub or proxy to an existing web service in order to use it in your application. For more information, see Using Web Services in Applications.

Discovering Web Services

JDeveloper incorporates a UDDI browser and comes with three predefined connections to public UDDI registries to help you quickly locate a web service. In addition, you can define connections to other UDDI registries, for example, to one within your organization. For more information, see Locating Web Services in a UDDI Registry.

Creating and Deploying Web Services

JDeveloper provides powerful tools that allow you to quickly develop web services that can be deployed as:

J2EE web services that are deployed to Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J).
SOAP web services that are deployed to the SOAP server in Oracle Application Server.

You can create a web service based on a Java class, an EJB, an ADF Business Components module wrapped as an EJB, and from a PL/SQL package containing program units. For more information, see Ways of Creating Web Services.

In addition, you can use JDeveloper's powerful UML modeling tools to model a web service on a class diagram, or create a web service based on a modeled Java class. For more information, see Modeling Web Services.

For information about the Java types that are supported in JDeveloper, and the XML types that they map to, see Java Classes and Web Services. This topic also contains information about creating custom serializers for types of object that are not automatically supported.

For information about deploying web services, see Deploying Web Services.

For more information about web services, see the Web Services Center on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) website, at http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/webservices/index.html.

Web Services and Oracle ADF

Another way of working with web services is to use one or more web services as business service providers in applications developed using the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF). For more information, see the following topics:

For information about using Oracle ADF, see Working with the Oracle Application Development Framework.
To find out how a web service can be used as a business service provider in an Oracle ADF application, see Working with Web Services in the Model Project.