S

SOAP (Simple Object Access protocol)

A protocol specification that defines the structure of the XML documents that web services consume and produce. SOAP is recognised as an industry standard and is widely adopted across software vendors, hardware platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

U

UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration)

A platform-independent XML-based registry by which businesses worldwide can list themselves on the Internet, and a mechanism to register and locate web service applications. It is the yellow pages of web services. You can search for a company that offers the services you need, read about the service offered or contact someone for more information.

URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)

A string of characters used to identify a name of a resource. It enables the interaction with representations of the resource over a network using specific protocols. ePages uses a URN (Uniform Resource Name) to identify a resource by name and version.

Example:

urn://epages.de/WebService/OrderService/2013/04

W

Web Service

A technology that allows applications to communicate with each other independently of the platform and programming language. A web service is a software interface that describes a collection of operations that can be accessed over the network through standardised XML messaging. It uses protocols based on XML to describe an operation to execute or data to exchange with another web service.

WSDL

An XML-based interface definition language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. A web service is completely described by its WSDL document. A WSDL file is an XML document that describes a set of SOAP messages (service) and how the messages are exchanged (method).

X

XSD (XML Schema Definition)

Specifies how to formally describe the elements in an XML document. It can be used by developers to express a set of rules to which an XML document must conform in order to be considered “valid” according to that scheme. In comparison to WSDL, XSD describes the data structure a method can handle.