Web Services and Applications

Web Services and Applications
© 2004-2005 K. Ramesh Babu
Last edited: January 4, 2005, 11:42 PM

Introduction
This web page serves as a "work in progress" for presenting web services to a lay technical person. When the web page is fully done, it can be considered to be a friendly tutorial on what web services are all about and, therefore, what kinds of web services can be enabled by making use of web services.

Concepts
It appears that, central to XML-based communication, is an engine that is able to parse and interpret XML documents inside the network.

One such technology is created by a company called Sarvega and its technology, XML EventStream Operating System, XESOS.

DataPower produces a product called XML Router and a technology called XG3 XML Security Engine.

Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) is "an application level protocol framework built on the foundation of XML and SOAP that is designed to provide a consistent model for building infrastructure-level protocols for web services and applications". GXA defines a web services protocol stack. This GXA specification includes 7 main concentrations -

WS-Security, a cornerstone of GXA that defines standard SOAP extensions that enable applications to construct secure SOAP message exchanges.
WS-Policy/trust, a framework for specifying and discovering the capabilities and requirements of a web service
WS-Routing/Referral, simple stateless protocols for routing and configuring SOAP messages over a variety of transposrts such as HTTP, TCP, and UDP.
WS-Transaction, specification of transactional properties of web services
Federation
WS-Inspection, a specification for inspecting a web site for available web services
Message encapsulation, a definition of a binary packging format for SOAP messages with attachments

Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) is being standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium.

A good place to start to understand web services is here.

Applications

Concluding Remarks

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