Web Service And Application Servers

Web Service and Application Servers Author: Vivek Sinha Date: January 2006

Web Service  According

to W3C, web service is a software system designed to support interoperable1 machine-to-machine interaction over a network (generally the World Wide Web)  Web Service typically uses Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). 1

Interoperability is the capability of different programs to exchange data.

Web Service - Evolution  Over

the time, software applications grew from large mainframe applications (e.g., Cardpac, VisionPlus) to client-server (e.g., SQL Server) to applications which can be used over the Web ( http://spreadsheets.google.com).  These Web applications break down the larger software system into smaller modular components, or shared services.  These applications are packaged and transported using standard Web protocols, such as XML and HTTP, thus making them easily accessible by any user on the Web.

Web Service - Benefits  Interoperability

among applications that span diverse hardware and software platforms  Easy and widespread access over the Web.  Cross Platform and Cross Language implementation using an XML based description language.  Web Services communicate with clients (both end-user applications or other Web Services) through XML messages that are transmitted by standard Internet protocols, such as HTTP.

Tightly Coupled and Loosely Coupled Applications A

tightly coupled application integrates all enterprise applications around a single RDBMS  A loosely coupled applications integrates with each other using explicit requirements, e.g, XML, SOAP etc.  Web services use loose coupling

Web Service Standards  Protocol

Stack is a collection of computer networking protocols. It consists of the following    

Service Transport – This includes protocols like HTTP, SMTP, FTP etc. XML Messaging – This is used for encoding messages in a common XML format Service Description – Used to describe public interface for the service used Service Discovery – A service to list business on Internet

 eXtensible

Markup Language (XML) is general purpose markup language

Web Service Standards …contd.  Web

Service Security (WS-Security) is protocol used for applying security

Web Service - Deployment  Web

Services can be deployed using an Application Server. BEA WebLogic  IBM Lotus Domino  IBM WebSphere  JBoss (with Tomcat)  Microsoft .NET servers  Oracle Application Server  Sun One (iPlanet) 

Web Service - Deployment …contd.  Application

Server is a software application which is used to run Web Portals  Web Server is used to display web pages using HTTP protocol  A web server is generally a part of the application server  An application server contains the business logic which can be used by a Graphical User Interface (GUI) application, web server or other application servers

Thanks! Author: Vivek Sinha Date: January 2006