What is a Web Service ?

Web Services are business logic components which provide functionality via the Internet using standard protocols such as HTTP.

Web Services uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in order to expose the business functionality.SOAP defines a standardized format in XML which can be exchanged between two entities over standard protocols such as HTTP. SOAP is platform independent so the consumer of a Web Service is therefore completely shielded from any implementation details about the platform exposing the Web Service. For the consumer it is simply a black box of send and receive XML over HTTP. So any web service hosted on windows can also be consumed by UNIX and LINUX platform.

What is ObjRef object in remoting ?

All Marshal() methods return ObjRef object.The ObjRef is serializable because it implements the interface ISerializable, and can be marshaled by value. The ObjRef knows about :-

• location of the remote object


• host name


• port number


• object name.

What is UDDI ?

Full form of UDDI is Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. It is a directory that can be used to publish and discover public Web Services. If you want to see more details you can visit the http://www.UDDI.org .

What is DISCO ?

DISCO is the abbreviated form of Discovery. It is basically used to club or group common services together on a server and provides links to the schema documents of the services it describes may require.

What is WSDL?

Web Service Description Language (WSDL)is a W3C specification which defines XML grammar for describing Web Services.XML grammar describes details such as:-

• Where we can find the Web Service (its URI)?


• What are the methods and properties that service supports?


• Data type support.


• Supported protocols

In short its a bible of what the webservice can do.Clients can consume this WSDL and build proxy objects that clients use to communicate with the Web Services. Full WSDL specification is available at http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl.