This section provides quick descriptions of Web Services and SOAP terms.
MEP (Message Exchange Pattern): An abstract presentation of how the SOAP framework specification
can be extended to meet some specific communication needs.
PPM (Perl Package Manager): A command line tool that you can
use to install e.g. Perl modules (like DBI database modules
for e.g. DB2, MySql, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, ...).
RPC (Remote Procedure Call): A protocol that allows a computer program running
on one host to invoke a procedure on another host with input data, and receive output data
from that host.
SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture): A software architectural concept that defines the use of services
to support the requirements of software users. In a SOA environment, nodes on a network make resources
available to other participants in the network as independent services that the participants access
in a standardized way. Most definitions of SOA identify the use of Web services (using SOAP and WSDL)
in its implementation. However, one can implement SOA using any service-based technology.
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): A standard for exchanging XML-based messages over a computer network,
normally using HTTP. SOAP forms the foundation layer of the web services stack, providing a basic messaging framework
that more abstract layers can build on.
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration): A platform-independent, XML-based registry
for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet. UDDI enables businesses to discover each other
and define how they interact over the Internet.
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier): A character sequence used to
identify a name of a resource or a location of a resource.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
A subset of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) used to identify a location of a resource
which consists of an address of the resource and a protocol used to reach that address.
The syntax of a URL is <protocol> "://" <address>.
For example, http://herongyang,com is a URL for my home page.
URN (Uniform Resource Name):
A subset of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) used to identify a name of a resource.
which consists of the "urn:" identifier, a namespace, and a specific string.
The syntax of a URN is "urn:" <NID> ":" <NSS>, where
where <NID> is the Namespace Identifier, and <NSS> is the Namespace Specific String.
For example, urn:issn:0167-6423 is a URN for the "Science of Computer Programming" journal.
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): The driving force behind the largest number of
highly adopted standards in the Web services space including some Web building
blocks such as HTML. W3C is a trademark owned by
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
and/or Keico (Keio University).
Web Service: An application programming service that can be accessed remotely via
standard Internet protocols using XML as the data format.
WSDL (Web Services Definition Language): An XML based standard designed to describes protocol
bindings and message formats of Web services. WSDL is often pronounced as "Whiz-Dull".
XML (Extensible Markup Language): XML (eXtensible Markup Language):
A markup language for organizing information in text files.
