Documentation Approach about Web Services for WebSphere

As part of the approach for delivering Web Services as part of WebSphere Application Server, the web services team is experimenting with multiple approaches for providing information to our end users. In addition to updating the Information Center about new features about web services, we are looking at alternative approaches to getting information into our hands of our end users. One approach is using developerWorks articles. For the Feature Pack for Web Services that we delivered on top of WebSphere Application Server v6.1, we worked with the developerWorks editors and put together a list of articles, which discuss the technology. As part of that work, we listed comparisons between JAX-RPC and JAX-WS (part1, part2, part3, part4, and part5) as well as the JAX-WS technology itself (via dispatch clients and JAX-WS annotations). For interoperability between the Feature Pack for Web Services and other vendors, we offer the following articles for interoperability with Microsoft (part1 and part2) and Apache Axis2. Other miscellaneous articles include a discussion of WS-I’s Supply Chain Sample Application built on the Feature Pack and troubleshooting web services applications in the Feature Pack and we have more in the pipeline.

Lastly, another approach is the usage of Redbooks. Members of our development organization participated with other IBM folks to help produce a Feature Pack for Web Services Redbook. These are all meant to be ways to compliment our existing Information Center and provide specific useful scenarios in a more end-to-end fashion to help our developers get on board.

I hope you like the approach and would be interested in hearing your feedback.