Tutorials good, understanding better
I’m working with web-services and with J2EE at present, two technologies that
have a bewildering collection of components and configuration options (and
configuration descriptors) by themselves. The Cartesian product of this
complexity is, well, you can imagine. All is not lost though: various good
souls have put together on-line tutorials
(example)
that show you, step-by-step, how to deploy a particular flavour of web service
(say doc/lit) on a particular flavour of J2EE container (say, JBoss). Well and
good, and a collective “thank-you” to all of those people. The problem I find,
however, is that the tutorial gets a result (you can deploy the sample
order-processing service and invoke it), but they don’t help you understand
the underlying technology. “Do this in webservices.xml” is all very well if
you want to do the same thing in your actual code, but if you need something a
bit different there’s not enough depth in a walk-this-way tutorial. Actually,
a reference to the specs would probably suffice in most cases. So, case in
point (should I ever need it again!), webservices.xml is actually defined in
JSR-000109.