Dear Diary: The Eternal Ramblings of Trevor Watson

In order to keep my CV (resumé) employer friendly, I've been looking into Web Services. Yeah, I know I'm several years late coming to this, but other stuff has conspired to keep me away from it!

I noticed a couple of weeks ago, whilst playing with Web Projects in NB 4.1, that there is a folder labelled "Web Services" created when you create a new web project, so now I can justify spending the time on it, I wondered how one went about creating a new web service.

On clicking the "Web Service" link in the new file/folder wizard, a new wizard window popped up to allow me to set some information about my new web service and (lo and behold) create the service from an existing WSDL file. Looks natty, so what does it do ?

I went off to t'Internet in search of an interesting WSDL file, and after sifting through mountains of so-called tutorials, eventually discovered a WSDL file for a real web service. Now, I have to say at this point that you would normally (apparently) use the WSDL file to create a web service client. However, I wanted to see what code NB would generate if I told it to create a service.

So, I input the URL of the WSDL file into the NB web service wizard, and 10 seconds later had a source tree fully populated with the classes needed to handle the input and return parameters for the web service and the framework for providing the service. All I would need to do is bolt in the code which actually processed the input parameters and set the return object contents.

This makes developing my own web service so much easier - once I've trainined myself up on WSDL format and XMLSchema - just define the service in WSDL and use NB to generate the necessary code to support it! All I can say about this is that it is quite the coolest thing in NB I've come across so far. Sorry Eclipse, but that'll be tough to top!