Web Services is the latest trend to hit the software industry. It promises to promote interoperability among disparate applications; i.e., applications written in different languages and running on diverse platforms. This book covers Web services protocols SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the J2EE APIs that are used with these protocols including: JAX-RPC, JAXM, JWSDL, and JAXR. The author explains in detail how to use these Java APIs with the J2EE platform and also provides detailed information on security issues and interoperability between J2EE platforms and .NET. The book also includes a primer on XML, XSD and JAXP (the Java XML API), which is necessary basis for understanding how to process SOAP messages.