Summary

This chapter reviewed some of the core technologies behind Web services. Make sure you understand the details of both SOAP and WSDL if you are planning on either exposing or consuming application data or logic via these means. It will make your life that much easier.

SOAP is a standard way of representing the message structure, and this chapter showed you this basic structure with a review of the SOAP envelope, header, and body. It also demonstrated SOAP faults and how to send effective SOAP error messages back to the consuming client.

The Web Services Description Language is a new XML-based language that is used to describe Web service regardless of the underlying platform on which the Web services reside. Now that you know how a WSDL document is constructed, you will be better able to discern the structure of a Web service from these documents.