Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials

Web Services Standards

The work of establishing basic standards for Web Services isn’t complete. Specifications exist for discovery, description, transport, and encoding. Some of these specifications have been submitted to the W3C to become standards (recommendations).

Extensible Markup Language

Both encoding schemes, XML-RPC and SOAP, are XML 1.0 applications. XML-RPC is a fairly simple XML application, so it uses only basic XML syntax. SOAP is a more complex application that makes extensive use of namespaces and XML Schemas.

XML-RPC

XML-RPC is a Web Service specification that uses a small XML vocabulary to encode its request and result messages and HTTP as the transport protocol. XML-RPC is a lightweight Web Service implementation that has limited datatype support. Regardless, it is effective and has implementations for most programming languages and operating systems.

Oracle Application Server doesn’t provide direct support for XML-RPC; however, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it with Oracle Application Server. Because XML-RPC has implementations in C, C++, Perl, and Java, you can deploy any of these implementations on Oracle Application Server.

You can find the specifications and a list of implementations for XML-RPC at http://www.xmlrpc.com.

SOAP

SOAP 1.1, originally called Simple Object Access Protocol when IBM and Microsoft, among others, submitted it to the W3C in April of 2000, is now an acronym without a name. SOAP 1.2 was released as an official recommendation in June of ...