Interesting question. In general, my view is that Web Service (SOAP, WSDL,
etc.) generally only make sense if you do not know the infrastructure you
are going to connect with.
That is, both Web Services and J2EE offer protocols for communicating
between distributed processes. Web Services allows you to avoid having to
know in advance what technology is going to be on the other end of the pipe,
at a significant performance penalty in processing time and data size. This
is suitable for Web Services target of publishing services to "the World"
that may be used by anybody. On the other hand, if you know the technologies
that are in use at both ends of the pipe, then a native J2EE interface and
protocol makes most sense. You need not pay the same performance penalty,
and still have the same range of platform support. Any other
protocol/environment, e.g., DCOM or BREW, has unacceptable platform
limitations.
In the case of keitai, given that: a) Java is common on the handsets, b) you
generally know all the elements you are going to be connecting to when
designing the service, J2EE makes the most sense as an implementation
protocol/technology/environment.
--
Eric Hildum
Received on Thu Dec 5 20:47:26 2002