# Why Build Web Services with WebLogic Workshop?

Web services promise a new level of integration for the enterprise, without prohibitive cost. Why should you build web services with WebLogic Workshop?

WebLogic Workshop provides a framework for building web services that automatically leverage the power, reliability and scalability of WebLogic Server. The web services that you build with WebLogic Workshop are enterprise-class services, and WebLogic Workshop provides simple controls for connecting to your enterprise resources. At the same time, WebLogic Workshop simplifies the process of creating web services by insulating developers from the low-level implementation details that have traditionally made web service development the domain of sophisticated J2EE developers. With WebLogic Workshop, you can build powerful web services whether you’re an application developer or a J2EE expert.

Web services that you build with WebLogic Workshop are asynchronous, loosely-coupled, and reliable. The following sections describe these advantages in greater detail.

## Asynchronous

Many business processes take more than a few moments to complete, but traditional architectures make it hard to handle long-running tasks efficiently. WebLogic Workshop helps you architect asynchronous web services easily using conversations and callbacks. Conversations help manage the typical problems in asynchronous messaging, namely correlating messages and managing some information or state between message exchanges. In an ongoing conversation, a web service can notify a client when the results of an operation are ready using a callback.

In addition, WebLogic Workshop supports the use of Java Message Service (JMS) queues as message buffers to ensure that web service messages are not lost regardless of server load. JMS can also be used by WebLogic Workshop web services to communicate with back end resources.

## Loosely-Coupled

Web services by their very nature are somewhat loosely coupled—information is exchanged using XML, which isolates clients of a web service from the implementation details of the web service. A web service publishes only an interface, or public contract, that determines how users can interact with the web service. As long as the messages and data formats described by this contract are maintained, the internal implementation of the web service (or the client) is free to change at will. Maintaining this contract requires a simple technology for changing how Java is mapped into XML (and vice versa) so that the public contract of your web service can be maintained with minimal work when the internal implementation changes.

## Reliable, Available, and Scalable

While the web services you create in WebLogic Workshop are simple to create, ultimately they are compiled to standard J2EE applications. This means your web services have all the reliability, scalability, and availability you've come to expect from J2EE applications running on WebLogic Server—absolute requirements for web services deployed in the enterprise.

Related Topics

Designing Asynchronous Interfaces