SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an architectural paradigm that aims to
achieve loose coupling and reuse among software components. It's emerging as
the main integration and architectural style in today's complex software
infrastructure.
Web Services aim to provide interoperability in machine-to-machine
interaction over the network. XML-based open standards like Web Services
Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) are used to achieve
interoperability for defining, publishing, and invoking Web Services. Two
applications, regardless of operating system or programming language,
communicate using XML messages over open Internet transport protocols such as
HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, and FTP
Web Services existed before the principles of SOA were defined but they came
into the limelight... (more)
This article critically evaluates the role of XML binding frameworks play in
the context of service-oriented architecture (SOA) platforms, and it also
provides an objective evaluation of the popular XML binding frameworks in a
J2EE environment.
XML binding refers to the mapping of XML documents to/from any suitable
internal representation (e.g., object-based representation) that is
understandable by the underlying system, and in the process facilitating easy
and intuitive access to the data in XML documents. In a J2EE context, this
translates to an easier and logically meaningfu... (more)
SOA has come a long way from a concept to wide-scale adoption by the
enterprise at multiple layers of IT. SOA implementation at the UI layer is
the latest in SOA adoption trends. SOA has manifested itself in a number of
flavors such as the creation of a rich user experience by using technology
like AJAX (e.g., Google Maps), provisioning value-added services by mashing
up data from multiple sources (e.g., chicagocrime.org), community-based
peer-to-peer interactions (e.g., Facebook and Flickr), creating collective
intelligence (e.g., Digg and del.icio.us), creating collaborative pl... (more)
The quality of any application is determined by the robustness and
scalability of the system. It's mandatory to simulate the actual environment
and test the application for preparedness. Web Services-savvy applications
need a different methodology for testing in a real-world scenario. The
UI-less nature of Web Services presents a significant challenge in testing
such applications. The whole persona of consumer stubs with different
payloads dictates the planning of Web Services load-testing schemes. This
paper talks about the different aspects of load testing and areas of
conten... (more)