Data Transformation Engine Intelligent Business Integration Reference Guide

Chapter 8 - Web Services Technologies Used in Web Services
Intelligent Business Integration Reference Guide
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If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then using Mercator
Integration Broker products such as our SOAP and HTTP adapters, the Event
Server, and the Event Agent, which acts as a listener for web service requests, is
the way to go.
Technologies Used in Web Services
Web services are built around widely-adopted Internet standards such as TCP/IP,
HTTP, Java, HTML, and XML plus an emerging set of new standard technologies
such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description
Language (WSDL), and Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
SOAP
SOAP defines the XML-based message format that applications use to
communicate and inter-operate with each other over the Web. The heterogeneous
environment of the Web demands that applications support a common data
encoding protocol and message format. SOAP is a standard for encoding messages
in XML that invoke functions in other applications. It is analogous to Remote
Procedure Calls (RPC) used in many technologies such as DCOM and CORBA, but
eliminates some of the complexities of using these interfaces. SOAP enables
applications to call functions from other applications, running on any hardware
platform regardless of different operating systems or programming languages.
SOAP Adapter
The SOAP adapter is used to aid in building a web service request and decode the
response. The SOAP adapter encodes and decodes messages in SOAP format. The
HTTP adapter acts as a transporter, enabling the adapter to transport SOAP
messages over HTTP. The SOAP adapter can also work with any other transport
adapter.
Note Refer to the Resource Adapters Reference Guide for information on the adapter
commands that enable the transporting, and encoding and decoding of messages.
WSDL
WSDL is a collection of metadata about XML-based services used for describing
what businesses do and how to access their services electronically. WSDL specifies
the procedures to discover functional and technical information about web services
over the Internet.