Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and
Infrastructures for Distributed Systems
Web Services
Outline
• Introduction to Web Services,
• Applications,
• Advantages of Web Services,
• Challenges,
• Service Oriented Architectures,
• Web Services:
– SOAP,
– WSDL,
– UDDI.
Introduction to Web Services
• Microsoft coined the term “Web services” in June 2000, when
the company introduced Web services as a key component of
its .Net initiative,
– A new vision for embracing the Internet in the development,
engineering and use of software.
• As others began to investigate Web services, it became clear
that the technology could revolutionise distributed computing.
• Now, nearly every major vendor is marketing Web services’
tools and applications and Web services are radically changing
IT architectures and partner relationships.
Introduction to Web Services
• Web services encompass a set of related
standards that can allow any two computers to
communicate and exchange data via a network,
such as the Internet.
• The primary standard used in Web services is
the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
developed by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C).
• Developers use XML tags to describe individual
pieces of data, forming XML documents, which
are text-based and can be processed on any
platform.
Introduction to Web Services
• XML’s portability and its rapid adoption throughout the
industry made it the obvious choice for enabling cross-
platform data communication in Web services.
• XML provides the foundation for many core Web services
standards:
1. SOAP,
2. WSDL,
3. UDDI,
– Plus vocabularies of XML-based markup for a specific industry or
purpose).
• Almost every type of business can benefit from Web services
such as:
– Expediting software development,
– Integrating applications and databases,
– Automating transactions with suppliers, partners, and clients.
Introduction to Web Services
• SOAP (was originally called the Simple Object
Access Protocol) is an XML vocabulary that lets
programs on separate computers to interact
across a network (via RPC).
• WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is
another XML vocabulary that lets developers
describe Web services and their capabilities in a
standardised format.
• UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and
Integration) is a framework that defines XML-
based registries where businesses can publish
information about themselves and the services
they offer.
Web Services’ Applications
• Unfortunately, interoperability, the ability to
communicate and share data with software
from different vendors and platforms, is
limited among conventional proprietary
technologies, e.g. DCE, CORBA, DCOM and
RMI.
• Web services improve distributed computing
interoperability by using open (non-
proprietary) standards that can enable
(theoretically) any two software components
to communicate:
– Also they are easier to debug because they are
text-based, rather than binary, communication
protocols.
The Advantages of Web Services
• Web services advantages:
– Use open, text-based standards, which allow components written in
different languages and for different platforms to communicate,
– Promotes a modular approach to programming, so multiple
organisations can communicate with the same Web services.
– Comparatively easy and inexpensive to implement, because they
employ an existing infrastructure and because most applications can
be repackaged as Web services,
– Significantly reduce the costs of enterprise application integration
(EAI) and B2B communications,
– Implemented incrementally, rather than all at once which lessens the
cost and reduces the organisational disruption from an abrupt switch
in technologies,
– The Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I) consisting of
over 100 vendors promotes interoperability.
Web Services’ challenges
• Web services’ challenges:
– The standards that drive Web services are still in
draft form, always will be in refinement.
– Some vendors want to retain their intellectual
property rights to certain Web services standards.
– Web services need standard security procedures,
a common problem to all of distributed
computing.
– The leading registry, based on the UDDI specification, has
some key limitations, and alternative discovery methods
are provided by ebXML and WS-Inspection.
– Web services need Quality of Service (QoS) support from
Web Services Registries, Brokerages, and Network
Providers.
Web Services Basics
• Web services:
– Software programs that use XML to exchange
information with other software via common
Internet protocols:
• Scalable, e.g. multiplying two numbers together to an
entire customer-relationship management system,
• Programmable - encapsulates a task,
• Based on XML - open, text-based standard,
• Self-describing - metadata for access and use,
• Discoverable - search and locate in registries,.
Architecture of Web Service
• A web service is a network accessible interface to
application functionality, built using standard
Internet technologies.
• Clients of web services do NOT need to know how
it is implemented.
Application
Application
client Web
code
Network Service
Web Services
WSDL
WSDL
1. Client queries registry to locate
Document
Document service.
UDDI
2
2. Registry refers client to WSDL
Registry
document.
3. Client accesses WSDL document.
4. WSDL provides data to interact with
3
Web service.
1
5. Client sends SOAP-message request.
4
6. Web service returns SOAP-message
response.
5
Client
Web
6 Services
Step1. Write Web Service Method
shopping web service?
Discovery
Discovery Web Service UDDI
Client
WSDL URIs
Description
Description Web Service
WSD
WSDL
SOAPL pkg
Packaging
Packaging Proxy request
SOAP pkg
response
Transport
Transport
Network
Network