Murali Janakiraman

In the past two years, we have witnessed an explosion of Web services and XML communication technologies. While WSDL , SOAP, and UDDI have become the accepted bases of Web services, there are even more standards in the making. This article is the first of a two-part series that examines the Web services technological space in order to provide an overview of some of the major Web services standards now in progress in various organizations and consortiums across the country. General Classifications of Web Services Web services technology can be broadly classified into three main groups, as shown in Figure 1.   The description stack deals with a wide range of technologies that describe Web services in order to facilitate their common use for business process modeling and workflow choreography in B2B collaborations. The discovery stack deals with technologies that allow... (more)

Building Blocks Part II

This article continues from the Web Services Journal article "Building Blocks - An overview of Web services technology" (WSJ, Vol. 2, issue 7). In Part I, I provided a functional classification of Web services technologies and examined technologies in the areas of service description, communication protocols, complex payloads, on-site inspection, and general discovery. In this installment, we examine technologies that address enterprise strength issues, such as transactions, security, and routing, and technologies that enable B2B collaboration. Transactions There are two kinds o... (more)