This document describes a scenario in which an online garden supply retailer uses Web services to integrate its inventory system with the inventory systems of other retailers. Also using Web services, the main Internet storefront can check supplier inventories on behalf of itself or other retailers.
The marketers at Plants by WebSphere confirm with market data that people are likely to purchase plants and gardening supplies in tandem with purchases of other goods, such as gardening books. To increase the visibility of Plants by WebSphere, the company arranges with various other merchant sites to include Plants by WebSphere inventory as part of their own.
At one site, Web services and other technologies are used to insert data about Plants by WebSphere items into Web pages that match the look and feel of the rest of the site. When a customer orders a Plants by WebSphere item at a site other than Plants by WebSphere, the second site relies on the Plants by WebSphere inventory Web service to make sure that the item is in stock, and to query suppliers as needed.
The second site does not have to implement its own Web services to perform the same function as those developed by Plants by WebSphere. The second site might want to implement sophisticated function by creating its own Web service.
By publishing the Web service, other retailers are made aware of the inventory Web service available from Plants by WebSphere. In this scenario, Plants by WebSphere enables the Web service to check its own inventory, as well as that of suppliers.
The application powering the Web site checks the Plants by WebSphere inventory database. It discovers that the item is not in stock.
The application invokes a Web services for J2EE or Java API for XML-based remote procedure call (JAX-RPC) SOAP client that communicates with a SOAP server at the supplier site to ascertain whether the supplier has the item in stock. The supplier data is sent to the reseller.
By publishing their Web services to UDDI, suppliers make them available for Plants by WebSphere and other retailers to discover and reuse. This saves development time, effort and cost, and helps minimize the need to maintain several different implementations of the same application at Plants by WebSphere and various other retailers who need to contact the suppliers for inventory data.
Public UDDI registries are run by a consortium named UDDI Operators Council, which includes IBM, NTT, SAP, and Microsoft.
Particular editions of WebSphere Application Server provide a private UDDI registry that can be used in an intranet environment.
In addition to publishing SOAP/HTTP bindings to the public UDDI registry for use by other vendors, Plants by WebSphere might also have published to an internal private UDDI registry with additional optimized bindings. A Web service provider such as Plants by WebSphere might offer a SOAP binding for the service and a local Java binding that allows you to treat the local service implementation or Java class as a Web service. If the client is deployed in the same environment as the service, the local Java binding for the service can be used. This provides more efficient communication with the service by making direct Java calls rather than using the SOAP binding.
Plants by WebSphere could use a gateway to handle Web service invocations between Internet and Intranet environments. A Web services gateway makes the internal Web service available externally. It takes care of these considerations: