The other broad category of web applications includes web services, which is a typical B2B technology. Web services have deeply changed the landscape of B2B services by introducing a common transport protocol for network communication, which before was left to different kinds of adapters and plugins provided by the single application server.
How do web services actually bridge different systems? Web services use XML as the standard for exchanging data across disparate systems. Specifically, the XML content needs to be converted to a format that is readable by the Java application and vice versa. Data binding is the process that describes the conversion of data between its XML and Java representations.
The current standard for designing web services is JAX-WS, which uses Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) to manage all of the data binding tasks. Specifically, JAXB binds Java method signatures and WSDL messages and operations, and allows you to customize the mapping...