Adelene Ng

This article is a follow-up to an earlier article "Exposing Legacy Applications" (WSJ, Vol. 3, issue 5). It demonstrates how to integrate legacy applications with Web services using Apache Axis. Axis, which is a complete rewrite of Apache SOAP, promises to be faster and more flexible than Apache SOAP. Two approaches will be illustrated here. The first uses the Axis API. In the second approach, the Axis tools (Java2WSDL, WSDL2Java) will be used to generate stubs. We then write a client that uses the generated stubs to access the Web service. The legacy application used in this article captures and outputs system accounting information in an ASCII format. Application Overview The details of the architecture and description of the various components can be found in the first article. I had a legacy application in which I wanted to expose its commonly called operations... (more)

Integrating XSL-FO into Web-Based Applications

This article demonstrates how we can integrate XSL-FO, XSLT, and JavaMail into our existing web-based applications. I show you how we can generate PDF reports for an application through the use of XSLT and XSL-FO embedded within the Java application. I also illustrate how the generated PDF file can be sent as an e-mail attachment using JavaMail. Although a variety of Web-based technologies such as servlets or Web services are available, I chose the JSP approach. A simple JSP-based test harness was written to demonstrate the integration of all these technologies. An HTML table re... (more)

Exposing Legacy Applications

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a wire protocol that is similar to CORBA's Internet Inter-ORB protocol (IIOP) for communicating between applications running on different operating systems, with different technologies and programming languages. Unlike IIOP, which is binary in nature, SOAP is text based. This XML-based protocol lets you call an application, or even an individual object or method within an application, across the Internet via HTTP. HTTP does not pose any compatibility and security problems, unlike RPC, since all Internet browsers and servers support HTTP. ... (more)