Chapter {5}

WSDL

Previous chapters introduced the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA), where consumers discover and invoke services published to service registries. Once a service is discovered,

• How does a service consumer know what the service offers?

• How does the service consumer know how to invoke the service?

• How can the service consumer differentiate between similar services offered by different service providers?

To answer these questions, we have to first understand the different elements of Web service description. The Web services technology stack in Chapter 1 introduced the notions of the service description layer and the service composition layer. These two layers are related, in that the service composition layer ...

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