NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs

The Application Server Environment
NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs—540083-001
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Web Service Providers
be used to link disparate systems both inside and outside of an organization. SOAP
has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement. This has made it popular
throughout the industry.
SOAP provides the communication protocol for communication between clients and
services. SOAP messages and data are formatted as extended markup language
(XML) documents. The SOAP specification describes the format for XML messages
that pass between service requesters and service providers.
NonStop SOAP is the HP implementation of SOAP. In the NonStop SOAP architecture,
an Integrity NonStop server, known as the SOAP server, is the service provider. The
SOAP server generates a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document,
which is an XML document describing the interface used to invoke a particular Web
service. The WSDL describes the SOAP messages and how the messages are
exchanged. It describes the Web service interfaces in enough detail to allow a user to
build a client application that can talk to the service. The SOAP server is also
responsible for interpreting a client request, invoking a service on the target server, and
receiving the service response and creating a SOAP response to be sent to the client.
A SOAP client is a program that creates an XML document containing the information
needed to invoke a service in a distributed system. Messages and requests from
SOAP clients are typically sent over HTTP. The SOAP server translates documents
received over the HTTP connection to a language the service understands.
For more information about BEA Weblogic Server, see the relevant product
documentation. Other HP partners also provide Web services products for the NonStop
platform.
Using the terms introduced is this discussion, we can now more precisely define a Web
service as a software service made available on the Internet through a Web service
provider, described with a WSDL file, and registered in a UDDI directory.