4. Describing Web Services
TO THIS POINT, WE’VE DESCRIBED XML and positioned it as the underpinning of the SOAP messaging protocol. Given that XML is a self-describing, human-readable representation of data, isn’t that enough to make a SOAP message also self-describing? If so, then why do we need an approach for service descriptions? We’ll answer these questions in this chapter.
Why Service Descriptions?
Let’s look at this problem from the service requestor’s perspective. A customer of SkatesTown wants to invoke the POSubmission service. How does the customer know what kind of message to send? Sure, they probably know to use SOAP, but SOAP is just the format of the envelope; SOAP itself doesn’t indicate what message format to put into the envelope. ...
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