Sunday, August 30, 2009

Understanding WSDL

This is an attempt to explain WSDL in the simplest manner

About WSDL
  • WSDL stands for Web Service Definition Language.
  • It is a contract to the web service that is expressed in XML. To understand better this can be compared to an Interface in Java or a Package in Oracle which acts as a contract between the client and the system.
Structure of WSDL (parallels are drawn to Java wherever possible)
  1. What are the capabilities of the Service? 
    • What are the operations(methods) provided by the Service and what are the messages(parameters) that each operation requires?
    • The messages can be input(parameters), output(return value) or faults(exception)
  2. How can the Service be accessed?
    • What is the protocol(SOAP) and what is the encoding(document)?
  3. Where can the Service be accessed?
    • What is the endpoint(address) of the Service?
 Illustration of the WSDL Structure
The CreditService web service developed earlier is used to illustrate





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