Question

define Web services, describe the technologies they use, and explsin how Web services benefit businesses

Answer 1

Web service is a standardized medium to propagate communication between the client and the server application.It is a software system that support machine to machine interaction over web.It is a collection of standards or protocols for exchanging information between two or more devices or applications.

The technologies used by web service are:

1 WSDL- It stands for web service description language. This language specification is a standard to describe and locate the web service.It contains following elements-

Type element: It contains all the datatype definitions relevant for sending and receiving the message.

Message element: This element specifies the data that would be communicated between a consumer and a provider.

Port type element: A port type represent set of related operation under a service.

Binding element: It is used to bind operation to the SOAP protocol.

Service element: It is a set of related port.

2. SOAP: It stands for simple object access protocol. SOAP is a W3C(world wide web consortium) recommendation for communication between services and application.It is a message access protocol to communicate with web services.It is platform and language independent protocol.It is communication protocol which can send message in XML format.

3. UDDI: It stands for universal description discovery and integration.It is an XML based standard for publishing and finding the web services, UDDI is a platform independent and open framework. It can communicate using SOAP. UDDi use WSDL to describe interface to web services,It is available with SOAP and WSDl.

Web service provide business benifits like:

versatility: Web service are also versatile by design.They can be accessed by humans via a web based client interface pr they can be accessed by other applications.A client can combine multiple data form multiple wen services.

code reuse: It is an advantage of web service which means one service might be utilized by several clients,all of which employ the operations provided to fulfill different business objectives.

Application and data integration:The inherent interoperability that comes with using vendor, platform, and language independent XML technologies as a transport mean that any application can communicate with any other application using Web services.The client only requires the WSDL definition to effectively exchange data with the service – and neither part needs to know how the other is implemented or in what format its underlying data is stored.These benefits allow organizations to integrate disparate applications and data formats with relative ease.

Cost savings: All the above benefits leads upto cost saving.Existing investments in systems development and infrastructure can be utilized easily and combined to add additional value. Since Web services are based on open standards their cost is low and the associated learning curve is smaller than that of many proprietary solutions.