Web services architecture
- Service provider (or service producer)
Create a service and possibly publishes its interface and accesses information to the service broker. You can review service provider settings via the console.
- Service requestor (or service consumer)
Locates entries in the broker registry using various find operations and then binds to the service provider in order to invoke one of its services. Another name for the service requestor is the service consumer. The terms are interchangeable.
- Service broker (or service registry)
Responsible for making the service interface and implementation access information available to any potential service requestor. The service broker is not necessary to implement a service if the service requestor already knows about the service provider by other means.
Each component can act as one of the two other components. For example, if a service provider needs some more information that it can only acquire from some other service, it acts as a service requestor while still serving the original request.
Terms
- SOAP SOAP
Network, transport, and programming language and platform-neutral protocol that enables a client to call a remote service. The message format is XML.
- Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
XML-based interface and implementation description language. The service provider uses a WSDL document in order to specify the operations a Web service provides, and the parameters and data types of these operations. A WSDL document also contains the service access information.
- Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)
Both a client-side API and a SOAP-based server implementation that can be used to store and retrieve information about service providers and Web services.
- Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL)
Locate Web services without using UDDI. XML-based. Can be used together with UDDI, and does not necessarily replace it. The UDDI and WSIL, separately or together, become the service broker.
