Herong's Tutorial Notes on Web Service and SOAP
Dr. Herong Yang, Version 4.00

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 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.

Last update: 2007.

Dr. Herong Yang, updated in 2009
Web Services and SOAP Terminology