Web Services and SOAP

A web service is a web-based software application that can be located and accessed via a set of standardized protocols and helper applications. Web services rely heavily on the following standards:

• XML and Schema, for data and metadata representation
• SOAP, for representing remote procedure calls and their associated data
• UDDI, for locating web services
• WSDL, for obtaining descriptions of the services

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML-based protocol that describes information that will be passed back and forth from the client to the web application. The information includes routing information, application data, and information about any errors that may have occurred.

SOAP and web services promise a hardware-neutral and vendor-neutral platform for web-based commerce and help decrease coupling between applications. Using SOAP and web services, a web application can be accessed:

• regardless of the programming language the client and server are written in
• regardless of the client or server operating system
• regardless of whether the service is currently active

SOAP and web services are the basis for much of the .NET initiative and the next generation of J2EE applications.

This one-day course will provide a technical overview of web services and SOAP, and their relationship with J2EE, .NET, and XML for software developers, tech leads, and architects who are evaluating or want to learn more about the technology.

The course is presented as 1 day of lecture with some live demonstration if facilities permit.

Students should know XML and have familiarity with an OO Programming language.

• Overview
• Motivation example
• What is SOAP?
• What is a web service?
• XML-based messaging
• SOAP messages
• Data Encoding
• SOAP over HTTP
• Relationship with .NET, J2EE, and XML
• Language bindings: C#, Java, Perl
• Example: Java server, Perl client
• Example: C# server, Java client
• Discovery (UDDI and WSIL)
• Description (WSDL)
• Example
• Security considerations
• Future directions

Programming Web Services with Soap, by James Snell et al. O'Reilly, 2002

Greg Holling