SOA Actors
When I am describing complex SOA or Web Service architectures, environments, and scenarios to clients, I often use the term “SOA Actors” to generically refer to components of such environments in the abstract. I will often do the same on Thinkmiddleware.com posts. Here, I define what I mean by this…
What is a Service Consumer?
A Service Consumer is any tier of an organization’s systems that calls web services. These services could be implemented by SOAP, REST, XML over HTTP, EJBs, JMS or MQ applications, RMI, RPC, invocation of COBOL programs on a mainframe with 3270 screen-scraping, communication over a custom TCP…
What is a Service Provider?
A Service Provider is any tier or system in an organization’s environment that hosts web services (or services of any kind).
What is an ESB?
In the past year, I have stood in a conference room at more than one client fielding a question along the lines of exactly what is an ESB? I’ve found that there is a wide variety of impressions about what exactly makes something an ESB. I’m hardly the first person to post something on the Internet…
What Is A SOAP Web Service?
A SOAP Web Service is any web service that is compliant with the SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2 specs. When referring to a SOAP Web Service we will use the capitalized Web Service. This convention is followed by most publications within the industry.
What is a Web Service? What is a web service?
This one has probably been addressed many times. But, I needed a place to link to whenever it comes up in other posts. For our purposes, a Web Service is SOAP Web Service and a web service is anything acting as a web service in the generic sense.
What Is A REST Web Service?
REST web services are not nearly as formalized as their SOAP equivalent. A REST web service adheres to the principals laid out in Roy Fielding’s PhD Thesis. REST stands for Representational State Transition.
What is an XML Gateway?
An XML Gateway is an externally-facing DMZ tier of a web services platform. Generally, this DMZ tier will be facing the Internet, but it may simply be between business units or facing a leased line connecting one entity to another. It can be implemented using a software solution (such as web…
Secure Identity Propagation using WS-Trust, WS-Security, and SAML2
I gave the following presentation at IBM Impact in April, 2011.
JAX-WS Example With JBossWS – Server-Side
In previous article, a very simple Web Application was presented. In any complex environment, there will often be multiple tiers within an application or environments hosting code/services for different teams. A common way of communicating within such environments is through SOAP-based Web Services…
EJB vs. Web Services
This article is by no means an exhaustive discussion on the subject of Web Services and EJBs. But, I have often found many of the points I bring up here missing from meaningful debate. Researching this article also gave me an opportunity to go over material I've been wanting to read for a while now.