Introduction to Web Services

Shiva Chitta

March 26th, 2014

2000 West Park Drive

Westborough MA 01581 USA
Phone: 508 389 7300 Fax: 508 366 9901

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 Agenda

• Motivation
• History
• Web service Big picture
• Web Service Components

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 Motivation & History

• Why Web services evolved ?

– To solve
1. Interoperability
Earlier distributed systems suffered from interoperability issues because each vendor
implemented its own on-wire format for distributed object messaging.
2. Firewall traversal
Web Services use HTTP as a transport protocol and most of the firewalls allow access
though port 80 (HTTP), leading to easier and dynamic collaboration
3. Complexity
Web Services is a developer-friendly service system.
Most of the above-mentioned technologies such as RMI, COM, and CORBA
involve a whole learning curve.

• What was there before Web services ?

- RPC, ORPC (DCOM, CORBA and JAVA RMI)

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 What is a Web Service?

• Piece of software available over Internet

• Uses standardized (i.e., XML) messaging system
• More general definition: collection of protocols and standards used for
exchanging data between applications or systems

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 Web Services Architecture

SOA(Service Oriented Architecture)

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 Web Services Components

XML – eXtensible Markup Language – A uniform data

representation and exchange mechanism.

SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol – A standard way for

communication.

UDDI – Universal Description, Discovery and Integration

specification – A mechanism to register and locate WS based
application.

WSDL – Web Services Description Language – A standard meta

language to described the services offered.

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 SOAP

SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol – A standard way for

communication.

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 Web Service Big Picture

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 Approaches to Build

• 1 Bottom-up approach
• 2 Top down approach

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 Web Services Advantages

•Language interoperability (Programming language independent)

•Platform independent (Hardware and OS independent)

•Function reusability

•Firewall friendly

•Use of standardized protocols

•Stateless communication

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 SOAP Request

POST /InStock HTTP/1.1

Host: www.stock.org
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 150

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope
xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope"
soap:encodingStyle=http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding”>

<soap:Body xmlns:m="http://www.stock.org/stock">
<m:GetStockPrice>
<m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>
</m:GetStockPrice>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

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 SOAP Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/soap; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 126

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope"
soap:encodingStyle="http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding">

<soap:Body xmlns:m="http://www.stock.org/stock">
<m:GetStockPriceResponse>
<m:Price>34.5</m:Price>
</m:GetStockPriceResponse>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

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 Summary: SOAP vs. REST

• REST – clients submit requests to Web services as HTTP requests

• SOAP – clients submit request in form of XML document
• SOAP advantages:
– Widely used and supported
– Supports variety of protocols (network transfer, authentication, encryption)

• REST advantages:
– Simple, relies only on HTTP protocol
– Performance and reliability

• Many sites support both SOAP and RESTful interfaces

– Amazon.com, XEMBL from EBI

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 Resources
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/unde
rstanding/webservicebasics/default.aspx
• http://www.w3schools.com/
• http://uddi.microsoft.com/Default.aspx
• http://www.developer.com/services/article.ph
p/2195981
• Many more on the web…

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 Q&A?

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 THANK YOU

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