The
Web Services Model OR architectures
The Web Services
architecture is based upon the interactions between three roles:
Service provider,
service registry and service requestor.
The interactions
involve the publish, find and bind operations.
Roles
in Web Services Architecture
There
are three major roles within the web service architecture:
Service Provider
This
is the provider of the web service. The service provider implements the service
and makes it available on the Internet.
Service Requestor
This
is any consumer of the web service. The requestor utilizes an existing web
service by opening a network connection and sending an XML request.
Service Registry
This
is a logically centralized directory of services. The registry provides a central
place where developers can publish new services or find existing ones. It
therefore serves as a centralized clearing house for companies and their
services.
Operations in a
Web Service Architecture
For
an application to take advantage of Web Services, three behaviors must take
place:
publish,
find and binding.
In detail, these operations are:
Publish. To be
accessible, a service description needs to be published so that the
service requestor can find it.
Find. In the find
operation, the service requestor retrieves a service description directly
or queries the service registry
for the type of service required
Bind. In the bind
operation the service requestor invokes or initiates an interaction with the
service at runtime
History
of the Web Services Specification
Web Services Description Language
(WSDL); Universal Description and Discovery (UDDI); and SOAP formed the
original Web Services specification. This section provides a history.
Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
For
our purposes, we can say that a WSDL file is an XML document that describes a
set of SOAP messages and how the messages are exchanged.
The
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) forms the basis for the original Web
Services specification. The following figure illustrates the use of WSDL. At
the left is a service provider. At the right is a service consumer. The steps
involved in providing and consuming a service are:
- A service provider describes
its service using WSDL. This definition is published to a repository of
services. The repository could use Universal Description, Discovery, and
Integration (UDDI). Other forms of directories could also be used.
- A service consumer issues one
or more queries to the repository to locate a service and determine how to
communicate with that service.
- Part of the WSDL provided by
the service provider is passed to the service consumer. This tells the
service consumer what the requests and responses are for the service
provider.
- The service consumer uses the
WSDL to send a request to the service provider.
- The service provider provides the expected response to the service consumer.
Universal
Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
Universal Discovery Description
and Integration is the yellow pages of Web services. As with traditional yellow
pages, you can search for a company that offers the services you need, read
about the service offered and contact someone for more information. You can, of
course, offer a Web service without registering it in UDDI, just as you can
open a business in your basement and rely on word-of-mouth advertising but if
you want to reach a significant market, you need UDDI so your customers can
find you.
A UDDI directory entry is an XML
file that describes a business and the services it offers. There are three
parts to an entry in the UDDI directory. The "white pages" describe
the company offering the service: name, address, contacts, etc. The
"yellow pages" include industrial categories based on standard
taxonomies such as the North American Industry Classification System and the
Standard Industrial Classification. The "green pages" describe the
interface to the service in enough detail for someone to write an application
to use the Web service.
SOAP
SOAP
at one time stood for Simple Object Access Protocol.
Soap
is the communications protocol for XML Web services.
SOAP
essentially provides the envelope for sending the Web Services messages. SOAP
generally uses HTTP
The
next figure provides more detail on the messages sent using Web Services. At
the left of the figure is a fragment of the WSDL sent to the repository. It
shows a CustomerInfoRequest that requires the customer's account to object
information. Also shown is the CustomerInfoResponse that provides a series of
items on customer including name, phone, and address items.
At the right of this figure is a
fragment of the WSDL being sent to the service consumer. This is the same
fragment sent to the repository by the service provider. The service consumer
uses this WSDL to create the service request shown above the arrow connecting
the service consumer to the service provider. Upon receiving the request, the
service provider returns a message using the format described in the original
WSDL. That message appears at the bottom of the figure.
XML is used to define messages.
XML has a tagged message format.
Examples
for Web Service
Weather Reporting: You can use Weather
Reporting web service to display weather information in your personal website.
Stock Quote: You can display
latest update of Share market with Stock Quote on your web site.
News Headline: You can display
latest news update by using News Headline Web Service in your website.
Advantages
of Web Service
Web Service messages are formatted as XML, a standard way for communication between two incompatible system. And this message is sent via HTTP, so that they can reach to any machine on the internet without being blocked by firewall.
In
short
What
is SOAP?
SOAP
(simple object access protocol) is a remote function calls that invokes method
and execute them on Remote machine and translate the object communication into
XML format. In short, SOAP are way by which method calls are translate into XML
format and sent via HTTP.
What
is WSDL?
WSDL stands for Web Service Description Language, a standard by which a web service can tell clients what messages it accepts and which results it will return.
WSDL stands for Web Service Description Language, a standard by which a web service can tell clients what messages it accepts and which results it will return.
WSDL
contains every detail regarding using web service and Method and Properties
provided by web service and URLs from which those methods can be accessed and
Data Types used.
What
is UDDI?
UDDI
allows you to find web services by connecting to a directory.