5.5. Conclusion

This chapter described the different types of clients that may access Web services and the issues faced by developers of these clients. It highlighted the differences between clients running in a J2EE environment from clients running in the J2SE and J2ME environments, and how these differences affect the design of a client application.

The chapter described the three communication modes available to clients: stubs, dynamic proxy, and dynamic invocation interface. These three modes form the basis for a client's access to a Web service. For each communication mode, the chapter discussed the steps for implementing Web service clients. It provided detailed discussions from how to locate and access a service through handling errors thrown by a service.

The chapter also described how to package different types of clients and discussed managing conversational state. It also provided guidelines for improving the overall end user experience.

The next chapter talks about XML in depth, since XML places a large role in Web services.