Web Services and SOAP Terminology

SOAP Web Service Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Web Services and SOAP Terminology

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 <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".