Managing State in Service-Oriented Architecture

Overview

One of the most common misconceptions about Web services is that they are appropriate only for supporting synchronous request/response SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)-based interactions. One of the main reasons for this misperception is that many Web services are implemented using unreliable, stateless transport protocols such as HTTP. As a result, many organizations are avoiding implementing Web services for handling complex business interactions, in which a service consumer may have multiple interactions with the same service or multiple interactions with several services, at a time. This paper explains how to use explicit state identifiers to support conversational Web services. It offers an overview of how to implement such an approach using the Oracle JDeveloper 10g 10.1.3 J2EE Developer Preview with built-in support for J2EE 1.4 JAX-RPC.