INTRODUCTION TO WEB SERVICES

3 Types Service Models:

Utility service:
A generic webservice designed for reuse and promotes interoperability and autonomy
Utility services are used within SOAs as follows:

as services that enable the characteristic of reuse within SOA

as solution-agnostic intermediary services

as services that promote the intrinsic interoperability characteristic of SOA

as the services with the highest degree of autonomy

Business service model:

The business service represents the fundamental building block.It encapsulates a set of business
logic within a well-defined functional boundary.
Business services are used within SOAs as follows:

as fundamental building blocks for the representation of business logic

to represent a corporate entity or information set

to represent business process logic

as service composition members

Controller service model:

The controller service acts as the parent service to service composition members.
Controller services are used within SOAs as follows:

to support and implement the principle of composability

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to leverage reuse opportunities

to support autonomy in other services

Service Oriented Architecture Overview

Web services Platform

4.1 SERVICE DESCRIPTIONS (with WSDL)

Service description helps to establish a loosely coupled form of communication between

services

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The description documents are required to accompany the service to act as an ultimate
receiver.

The primary service description document is the WSDL definition.

4.1.1 Service endpoints and service descriptions

WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language

WSDL is used to describe web services. It specifies the location of the service, and the
methods of the service

WSDL is written in XML

A WSDL describes the point of contact for a service provider referred as the service
endpoint.

It provides a formal definition of the endpoint interface and also establishes the physical
address of the service.

A WSDL service description can be separated into two categories:

abstract description

concrete description

Abstract description

An abstract description establishes the interface characteristics of the Web service

without any reference to the technology used to host or enable a Web service to transmit
messages.

3 main parts of an abstract description:

1. Port Type - Describes the operations that can be performed and the messages
involved.
2. Operation - Each operation represents a specific action performed by the service

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3. Message Defines the data elements for each operation

Concrete description

To execute any logic, web services needs its abstract interface definition to be connected
to some real, implemented technology (say, physical transport protocol). This connection
is defined in the concrete description portion of the WSDL file

3 parts of concrete description:

1. Binding - Defines the protocol and data format for each port type. SOAP is the most
common form of binding
2. Port - which represents the physical address at which a service can be accessed with a
specific protocol.
3. Service - refers to a group of related endpoints

Structure of a WSDL document

<definitions>
<types>

data type definitions........

</types>

<message>

definition of the data being communicated....

<portType>

set of operations......

<binding>

protocol and data format specification....

</message>

</portType>
</binding>

</definitions>
Eg:
<definitions>
<message name="getTemperature">
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<part name="Zipcode" type="xs:string"/>

</message>
<message name="getTemperatureResponse">
<part name="Result" type="xs:Float"/>
</message>
<portType name=WeatherPort>
<operation name=GetTemperature>
<input message=getTemperature />
<output message=getTemperatureResponse />
</operation>
</portType>
<binding name=WeatherBinding type=wsdlns:WeatherSoapPort >
<soap:binding style="document" transport= "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http" />
<operation>
<soap:operation soapAction="http://example.com/getTeperature"/>
<input><soap:body use="literal"/></input>
<output><soap:body use="literal"/></output>
</operation>
</binding>
</definitions>
4.1.2 Metadata and service contracts

Various service description documents used are:

WSDL definition - WSDL definitions usually rely on XSD schemas to formalize

the structure of incoming and outgoing messages

XSD schema provides the structure rules of the document

Policy - Policies can provide rules, preferences and processing details above and
beyond what is expressed through the WSDL and XSD schema documents.

Each of these three service description documents can be classified as service metadata
since they provide information about the service.

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Service description documents can be collectively viewed as establishing a service

contract, a set of conditions that must be met and accepted by a potential service
requestor to enable successful communication.

4.1.3 Semantic Descriptions

This refers to explaining the services behavioral characteristics

Service semantics include:

How a service behaves under certain conditions

How a service will respond to a specific condition

What specific task the service is most suited for?

The main objective is to provide semantic information in a structured manner so that

the service requestor can evaluate and choose suitable service providers
independently

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