Although it is hard to cover the full scope of Web services in one chapter, this chapter did cover the general topic of service-oriented architectures, with an emphasis on the main standard components of Web services architectures. We briefly covered the use of XML as the central data format in today's Web architectures. This led us to explore the use of XML in SOAP as a message format for Web services. The next step in fully specifying Web services was the description mechanism. Here, WSDL has become the de facto standard, and we saw how to generate WSDL descriptions for our services. Finally, we covered the UDDI discovery mechanism. |