Arjen Poutsma, core developer of the Spring Framework's Web services subproject, has posted an excellent tutorial on how to approach Web services development in contract-first style, i.e. starting with the XML Schema/WSDL contract instead of Java or C# code.
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Community comments
Just another application of interface-first development
by Michael Burke,
Re: Just another application of interface-first development
by Alef Arendsen,
Just another application of interface-first development
by Michael Burke,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
It strikes me that this is just another example of interface-first design - TDD applies this at the Java interface level; here, it's at the webservice level.
We've been through the same thing with IDL and CORBA, RMI and J2EE - think hard about the granularity, clarity, domain relevance, performance flexibility of your interfaces - there are different design pressures at play at the remote interface level compared to the java interface level.
Re: Just another application of interface-first development
by Alef Arendsen,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
Well, test-driven development doesn't necessarily dictate interface-first design, but it's certainly a practice worth thinking about. For me it works really well in the world of curly braces, especially in combination with tools like EasyMock.
It's good to see that approaches like these are finally starting to appear in the web services world as well!