Java’s resources for building SOAP-based web services are unfamiliar to many developers, and even those who are familiar with them are challenged by how rapidly they’re evolving. Java and SOAP is designed for both groups of developers.

Over time, SOAP development will become increasingly transparent: You’ll write your Java code, and the SOAP APIs will do all the heavy lifting. But until nirvana arrives, you do need to concern yourself with encoding and interoperability issues (think .NET). So you’ll really appreciate the “under the hood” information this book gives you — not just about encoding, but also about custom object types and serialization, handling errors and attachments, and many other crucial topics.

Author Rob Englander also does an admirable job of preparing you for changes yet to come. For instance, while its examples are based on Apache SOAP 2.0 (and the widely used “GLUE” alternative), Englander also previews Axis, a forthcoming “from-scratch rewrite” that will make Apache SOAP more modular and flexible while offering far better performance. There’s also a full chapter on Sun’s brand-new Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC).