webservices.xml.com Article Archive

A review of the emerging XML-based web services platform, examining the core components of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI."

Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL) allows the business level conversations or public processes supported by a Web service to be defined. WSCL specifies the XML documents being exchanged, and the allowed sequencing of these document exchanges. WSCL conversation definitions are themselves XML documents and can therefore be interpreted by Web Services infrastructures and development tools.

Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) is a language for the description of Web Services compositions. WSFL considers two types of Web Services compositions:

Business Process Query Language (BPQL) is a management interface to a business process management infrastructure that includes a process execution facility (process server) and a process deployment facility (process repository

Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) is an XML and Web Services specification that will allow for the plug-n-play of: portals, other intermediary web applications that aggregate content, and applications from disparate sources.

Web Services User Interface (WSUI) enables Web platforms implemented in entirely different languages (Java, COM/.NET, and Perl) to interoperate and share applications

Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) is an XML and Web Services centric framework for interactive Web applications. The designs must achieve two main goals: enable businesses to distribute web applications through multiple revenue channels, and enable new services or applications to be created by leveraging existing applications across the Web.

Web Services Experience Language (WSXL) enables businesses to distribute Web applications through multiple revenue channels and to enable new services or applications to be created by leveraging existing applications across the Web. WSXL is built on widely accepted established and emerging open standards, and is designed to be independent of execution platform, browser, and presentation markup. Interactive Web applications that are developed using WSXL can be delivered to end users through a diversity of deployment channels: directly to a browser, indirectly through a portal, or by embedding into a third party Web application.

Web Services Security (WSS or WS-Security) describes enhancements to SOAP messaging in order to provide quality of protection through message integrity, and single message authentication. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of security models and encryption technologies.

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is an XML-based framework specification for exchanging user, resource, and service provisioning information.

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an XML framework for exchanging authentication and authorization information.

The messaging components use the messaging specifications. There are two types of components described here:  Web Services adaptors and Web Services message routers

The Web Services Component Model (WSCM) is an XML and Web Services centric component model for interactive Web applications.

This section provides information on model and meta-model specifications that are available for Web Services. The use of models and meta-models, unfortunately, are often overlooked in discussions of Web Services. It is important to familiarize yourself with the models and meta-models available.

Translation Web Services defines industry standard business process terminology which will then drive the development of an industry standard WSDL (new window) file and UDDI (new window) business service entries. Organization: OASIS. More information: Translation Web Services page on the OASIS Web site.

This section provides a brief background on many of the important consortia and standards organizations working on specifications related to Web Services. At one time, software standards needed to be approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The last decade or so, however, has seen the rise in importance of industry consortia developing standard specifications. The reasons for this vary, but industry consortia now play an important role in the creation of standards.

This section contains information on specifications related to Web Services. There is a wide range of categories of specifications needed for Web Services to be successful.

First, defining Web Services using Web Services Description Language (WSDL) will be reviewed. That will be followed by SOAP, which provides means of sending messages.

A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed.