Editing Web services protocol stack

A '''web service protocol stack''' is a [[protocol stack]] (a stack of computer networking [[protocol (computing)|protocol]]s) that is used to define, locate, implement, and make [[Web services]] interact with each other. A web service protocol stack typically stacks four protocols:

* '''(Service) Transport Protocol''': responsible for transporting messages between network applications and includes protocols such as [[HTTP]], [[SMTP]], [[File Transfer Protocol|FTP]], as well as the more recent [[BEEP|Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol]] (BEEP).
* '''(XML) Messaging Protocol''': responsible for encoding messages in a common [[XML]] format so that they can be understood at either end of a network connection. Currently, this area includes such protocols as [[XML-RPC]], [[WS-Addressing]], and [[SOAP (protocol)|SOAP]].
* '''(Service) Description Protocol''': used for describing the public interface to a specific Web service.  The [[Web Services Description Language|WSDL]] interface format is typically used for this purpose.
* '''(Service) Discovery Protocol''': centralizes services into a common registry so that network Web services can publish their location and description, and makes it easy to discover what services are available on the network. [[Universal Description Discovery and Integration]] (UDDI) was intended for this purpose, but it has not been widely adopted.

The protocol stack can also include a range of higher-level protocols such as [[Business Process Execution Language]] (WS-BPEL) or [[WS-Security]] for security extensions.

==External links==
*[http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=31076&seqNum=2 Alex Nghiem (2003) The Basic Web Services Stack]
*[http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2002/02/12/webservicefaqs.html Ethan Cerami (2002) Top Ten FAQs for Web Services] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070309161645/http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2002/02/12/webservicefaqs.html |date=2007-03-09 }}
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20060106050052/http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/ innoQ (2007) Web Services Standards as of Q1 2007]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20041205100600/http://roadmap.cbdiforum.com/reports/protocols/ Lawrence Wilkes (updated Feb 2005) The Web Services Protocol Stack]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20041204154317/http://webservices.xml.com/lpt/a/ws/2002/01/09/soap.html Pavel Kulchenko (2002) Web Services Acronyms, Demystified]

[[Category:Web services]]


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