Web Service can be described as combination of one or more methods. We can integrated web service with one or more applications, regardless of any Programming Language, hardware and software platforms used to develop them.
Main benefits of Web Service are they can easily integrate with any application; these applications can exchange data using Web Service. Other benefit is Web Service is easily accessible over Internet and also you can integrate them with different applications.
Elements of Web Service are:-
1) XML (Extensible Markup Language) - XML is used to exchange data over Internet. Because XML is a plain text format that can be understood by any type of hardware over the web, it is able to fulfill this requirement.
2) SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) - To be able to communicate with each other, a web service and client must agree upon a common protocol. SOAP is a standard communication protocol for interchanging information in a structured format in a distributed environment.
The information exchanged between the client application and a web service is called message. Messages include call made by client application to a web method and data returned by web method to client.
When a client application makes a request for Web method a SOAP packet is created. This packet contains the name of web method to be invoked and parameters to be passed to the web method in an xml format.
3) WSDL (Web Services Description Language) - To be able to use a web service the developers of client application need t know the methods exposed by web service and parameters to be passed to these methods.
This information should be readily accessible to web service during design phase and WSDL is the markup language that uses the web service.
4) (UDDI) Universal Description, Discovery and Integration - It provides a standard mechanism to register and discover a web service. Provider register the web service in UDDI directory which contains pointers to the Web service and the WSDL document in web service.
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