Web Services For Dummies

A web service is a collection of standards and protocols used for exchanging data between different systems or applications. The primary idea of web services is to allow software applications written in various programming languages, which are running on different operating systems, to communicate between each other across a computer network. To agree upon some way of communication, there must be some standards. These standards are being administered by OASIS and the W3C.

Standards followed:

1)Protocol Stack: The main standard and protocol used to build a web services is known as a protocol stack. It’s basically a collection of networking protocols that that are used to define, locate, implement and make web services talk to each other. These protocols can be categorised into four parts depending on their functionality.

a) Transport: These are the protocols responsible for the communication between different applications. Examples are HTTP,SMTP,FTP. They act as the internet layer protocol.

b) XML Messaging: These are protocols responsible for encoding the data into xml format. Examples include SOAP,XML-RPC. They act as the transport layer protocol.

c) Service Description: These are the protocols required to give a description of the interface of the web services. Currently Web Server Description Language (WSDL) is used for this.

d) Service Discovery: These are the protocols used to register a web service into a common registry, and publish their location and description for easy retrieval and usage. UDDI is currently used for this purpose.

2) Data : All the data that is transferred with XML tags . The fitting of data into tags, and transporting them to transport protocols like HTTP, FTP or SMTP are done by protocols like SOAP etc.

The working of web services will be provided in my blogs next week.