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Web Services Essentials
book

Web Services Essentials

by Ethan Cerami
February 2002
Beginner
308 pages
8h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Web Services Essentials

Chapter 6. WSDL Essentials

WSDL is a specification defining how to describe web services in a common XML grammar. WSDL describes four critical pieces of data:

  • Interface information describing all publicly available functions

  • Data type information for all message requests and message responses

  • Binding information about the transport protocol to be used

  • Address information for locating the specified service

In a nutshell, WSDL represents a contract between the service requestor and the service provider, in much the same way that a Java interface represents a contract between client code and the actual Java object. The crucial difference is that WSDL is platform- and language-independent and is used primarily (although not exclusively) to describe SOAP services.

Using WSDL, a client can locate a web service and invoke any of its publicly available functions. With WSDL-aware tools, you can also automate this process, enabling applications to easily integrate new services with little or no manual code. WSDL therefore represents a cornerstone of the web service architecture, because it provides a common language for describing services and a platform for automatically integrating those services.

This chapter covers all aspects of WSDL, including the following topics:

  • An overview of the WSDL specification, complete with detailed explanations of the major WSDL elements

  • Two basic WSDL examples to get you started

  • A brief survey of WSDL invocation tools, including the IBM Web Services Invocation ...

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Publisher Resources

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