Sun provide a Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP) [43]. This assumes you have no existing specialist software (other than the Java 2 SDK), and it allows you to get started in a number of different areas besides Web Services.

Sun's WWW page says that the Java WSDP ‘is a free integrated toolkit that allows Java developers to build, test and deploy XML applications, Web services, and Web applications. The Java WSDP provides Java standard implementations of existing key Web services standards including WSDL, SOAP, ebXML, and UDDI as well as important Java standard implementations for Web application development such as JavaServer Pages and the JSP Standard Tag Library. These Java standard implementations allow developers to send and receive SOAP messages, browse and retrieve information in UDDI and ebXML registries, and quickly build and deploy Web applications based on the latest Java standard implementations’.

There is a lot of software (70MB) in the Java WSDP including Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM), Java API for XML Processing (JAXP), Java API for XML Registries (JAXR), Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC), SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), Java WSDP Registry Server, Ant Build Tool and Apache Tomcat. The size of the file containing the download of the Java WSDP is 34.5Mb.