Spanky's Place :: JMP402 Introduction to SOA and Web Services

Category LS 2007

Speakers: George Langlais (IBM) and John Grosjean (IBM)

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been around for a while now; but it is fast becoming a major industry buzzword. From the sessions db:

Web services have become the primary way for diverse systems to interoperate and, in particular, are fundamental to how IBM products such as WebSphere Portal and Lotus Domino interact with each other and with other products. This session explains Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as well as key Web services technologies (WSDL, SOAP, REST, etc.), and it provides a foundation for understanding many other sessions presented later in the week. We'll also highlight current and planned Web services support in Lotus Domino.

Introduced SOA, early vs. late binding, benefits of SOA, and gave some theoretical examples.

Converging Technologies - Development of the Internet
Universal, Standards based
People can access Web Data, but not programs - ie: a person uses a browser to hit a site and gather information. HTML "Scrapers" were developed to gather this information but were very clunky and awful.
Seperation of UI code from underlying services (not a new idea) combined with standards-based, program friendly protocols (XML, SOAP, etc) helped to solve this.
Programs don't care about the UI -they just care about the information available from the Web service.

Web Services = SOA Based on Web Standards

UDDI - Universal Description, Discover, & Integration
WSDL - describes the service
SOAP - (Simple Object Access Protocol) packaging mechanism
HTML, XML - tag layer
HTTP - transport layer

Service directories can publish a WSDL document to a service provider to describe the service. The Service consumer (program) can query both the directory and provider for information about the service and how to use it.,

Standards Organizations:

IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
OASIS - E-business standards
WS-I Web Service Interoperability

Web Services = SOAP and/or REST

SOAP - Distributed computing: self-describing, extensible, interoperable, transport agnostic. Based on XML SOAP, WSDL, UDDI
REST - Representational State Transfer through resource requests. HTTP, URL's, HTML, XML, etc. Heavy use with client-side development.

This session was a very good primer on just what the heck is meant by SOA and Web Service. I think it was perfect for a JumpStart in that it was extremely deep an detailed -understand that this was not a session for beginners. People without a good strong background in XML, XSL, namespaces, and SOAP would have been overwhelmed pretty quickly. I enjoyed it very much, even though I am by no means an expert on this.

Overall I think this was an excellent session; I would recommend that it be repeated (with updates of course) next year.