SOAP Web Services

Web services are the fundamental building blocks in the move to distributed computing on the Internet. Open standards and the focus on communication and collaboration among people and applications have created an environment where web services are becoming the platform for application integration.

This white paper provides an overview of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services and some of the technologies used in web services today. This paper also covers the Jade implementation of the SOAP‑based web service provider and consumer features, along with a detailed example.

For details about RESTful web services, see the REST Services white paper (which is also available from the Jade website at https://www.jadeplatform.com/developer-centre/learn/whitepapers).

SOAP web services generally provide the following features.

• Expose useful functionality to web users through a standards‑based web protocol.

• Provide a way to describe their interfaces in enough detail to allow a user to build a client application to talk to them. This is usually provided in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document called a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document.

• Are registered so that potential users can find them easily. This is done with Universal Discovery Description and Integration (UDDI).

For more details, see the following subsections.