This article describes the Service Web, outlines the key standards of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, and discusses new tools for developing Web services. Armed with this information, you should be able to understand how Web services can enhance your business and how you can begin developing them.
Understanding Web Services
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Are there some websites that talk about what alternatives one have ? Webservices are a mess, slow, a pain to work with and develop. Everyone invents their application protocol anyway..
you think they are a mess and hard to develop?
i just read the article, and was rather impressed by the amount of standardization with SOAP. i am sure that web services will improve using SOAP as a standard. i develop with php and was curious to see any php api’s for SOAP services and clients, and found nuSOAP, a php class for handling web services. i read an example script and it looks like it’s fairly easy to use, and integrate into your existing web applications, you just have to duplicate your functionality into the web service.
“Everyone invents their application protocol anyway.. ”
this type of thinking is what leads to closed standards, and is probably why you think web services are a pain to work with, because you had to deal with applications with their own protocol, the SOAP standard makes things easier for developers, and utilizes a single protocol.
get with it.
Contrary, to the first posters comments, the article does demonstrate that web services, web applications and web protocols are predominantly open source and open standard. If they weren’t, it would lead to failure on the part of businesses that adopt proprietary protocols as interoperability and communication, which the internet depends on, will be broken.
Excellent article. I’d love to see more of these types of articles from OSnews. You would be hard pressed to find trolls on threads containing such enlightening articles as this one is.
Regards,
Mystilleef
Contrary, to the first posters comments, it is actually pretty trivial to implement web services and to use them. The problem is none one yet has a compelling reason to use them.
This is really going to get huge in the next couple of years. It’s like open source in that anybody can use the code only they can’t see the actual source. Why will it be huge? Because companies will be able to build more and better applications with fewer benjamin hungry programmers. A scary thought but shouldn’t we be using our brains to design apps, not necessarily write them?
I hope they get the security standards worked out because integrating WS into ones organization brings the risk that a fried WS Server could affect day to day processes that we will all come to rely on.
Have a look at REST web services. I can’t stop thinking about how it ease really coarse grain integration.
… is that’s all about tunnelling RPC through the Web not building services on the Web.
XML-RPC was the predecessor to SOAP and should work for simple, loosely coupled designs. DCOM and CORBA are good solutions for apps confined to an intranet, with more or less homogeneous nodes (they can still serve web pages to the greater ‘Net). If you can live with a nailed-up design and don’t care about interop with the outside world, you can roll your own RPC as the first poster suggested. But the latest generation of platform, library and tool support is all oriented towards SOAP+WSDL+UDDI.