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Article Excerpt
Today Web services is still an evolving and emerging technology. This article covers a number of use models, from the perspective of both the developers building systems that incorporate Web services, and the user's experience with these systems.
Web services represents an evolutionary development of the original, browser-based Web developed at CERN in the early '90s. The original Web assumes the existence of a human interacting with a browser and a Web server that responds to browser requests over a network. Web services adds a number of standards and protocols that allow computers in a network to interact autonomously, driven by programs, in lieu of browser and server interactions. The loosely coupled, architecture-independent characteristics of the original Web are preserved. Some essential standards include:
* Extensible Markup Language (XML): A universal data format
* Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP): A protocol to convey XML
* Universal Discovery, Description, and Integration (UDDI): A method for the different Web services to find each other
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL): An XML-based language used to describe the goodies available from a specific Web service
The purpose of these standards and protocols becomes obvious once you realize that the Web services-specific standards mimic their browser-based counterparts--XML is used as the data format for machine-to-machine interactions instead of the HTML format used in the traditional Web. HTML contains annotations to instruct the browser on how to display the data within. These annotations would be superfluous in machine-to-machine interactions. SOAP is a protocol that allows XML data to be encapsulated inside HTTP messages. Strictly speaking, there is no requirement that HTTP be used. It's perfectly possible to do the encapsulation inside mail (SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) messages. This possibility has been mentioned in the literature, although it is not in use today. Finally, UDDI and WSDL mimic the functionality of a Web search engine. It is significantly easier to write a program that uses UDDI and WSDL than a program that parses the unstructured...
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