Sunday, June 15, 2008

Web Services and Dynamic Languages

I have been brushing up on my web services skill set. The Java platform has a really nice implementation now with JAX-WS particularly JAX-B when combined with Intelli-J. The Jet Brains folks provide good tutorials for both Apache Axis and default Sun web service implementations. I have experimented with both.

However an area which is currently lacking concerns the combination of web services with dynamic languages such as Groovy particularly a Grails friendly integration. It is not always ideal to handle every web request RESTfully and if you have to use SOAP then JAX-WS makes life *a lot* easier.

The main question I have now is if you have a java web application to serve as your web service and a GRAILs application to serve as your web user interface is there anyway to share the Grails controller with the web service to prevent duplication of a persistence layer? My reading continues...