Web Services and Primitive SOA

Contemporary SOA is intrinsically reliant on Web servicesso much so that Web services concepts and technology used to actualize service-orientation have influenced and contributed to a number of the common SOA characteristics we identified in Chapter 3. An understanding of SOA therefore begins with a close look at the overall framework that has been established by the first and second-generation Web services extensions.

We can categorize concepts provided to us by these specifications into the following two groups:

• Basic concepts that relate to primitive SOA and core Web services standards (covered in this chapter).
• Advanced concepts that extend the basic framework to support numerous supplementary features that relate to specific contemporary SOA characteristics (covered in Chapters 6 and 7).

This chapter kicks things off with an introductory overview of the concepts of the first-generation Web services framework as related to the realization of primitive SOA characteristics.

Note

The framework we've assembled here consists of terms and concepts derived from a number of open specifications, including WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI. If you are already comfortable with these technologies and concepts relating to Web services in general, you can skip ahead to Chapter 6.

 

In Plain English sections

For those not yet familiar with the topics covered by this chapter, we provide the In Plain English sections. Their purpose is to convey the most fundamental concepts behind specific topics by providing intentionally simplistic, non-technical analogies. If you are new to the world of Web services, these sections will hopefully provide some extra clarity.

 

How case studies are used: We introduce the Web services-enabled portions of the RailCo and TLS solution environments and highlight specific parts of these applications to demonstrate some key concepts.