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Useful Web Services Terms

The following is a typical list of acronyms and terms that describe Web services.

UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration.

UDDI is the directory that lists the services available at a particular Web services location.

WSDL: Web Services Description Language.

WSDL is a formatted description that identifies a Web service and what it does.

SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol.

Think of SOAP as the envelope that contains the XML data. It is also built around HTML, or the way Web pages are packaged. The importance of the HTML is that it can be sent through firewalls.

SAML: Security Assertion Markup Language.

This involves basic security authentication and authorization.

Queues:

The ability to post a request or answer to a holding area where a Web service can pick up the request and/or return the result. MQ is the industry standard, except for Microsoft, which uses MSMQ.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, July 29, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.