What’s up with the plethora of APIs for doing web services? When SOAP was first invented, I played with it, but not having an immediate need for the technology, I didn’t stay with it. Well, now I do, but I’ve been having trouble making heads or tails of all the latest specifications for working in this medium.

And the web, in this case, wasn’t helping.

What I figured I needed was a tutorial, that gave me a good overview of the current state of affairs as well as how the different technologies compare. So, I picked up Java Web Services in a Nutshell (Kim Topley), and it is certainly living up to my wishes.

Since the world of web services change rapidly, I decided that I wanted a book that gave me information on SAAJ, and since it came out this year (well, 2003), it is up-to-date. Granted, now that I’m plowing my way through the book, I’m sure that I will never get to lower-level protocols, and will probably stay with JAX-RPC, which is the API library for us mere mortals.

So, my first criteria, that the book be up-to-date was met (It has a comparison between the “Java Web Services Developer Pack” and the latest version of the J2EE 1.4 release), but my other criteria were things like, heavy use of examples, not too much information about the background on web services, and keeping the information practical.

In these regards, the book measures up quite well, as Topley has a good balance between background and trying to explain known topics. The examples are also quite good and in the first chapter, the book builds a web server that sucks up information from Amazon.com.

Now, I think I’m in the same boat that everyone else is at … what problems can I invent in order to solve it with this cool new technology.