Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Xplicating XML

In This Chapter

• XML Xplained

• Web services

• SOA alphabet soup

• You need SOAP (and WSDL)

According to the biblical story, early humanity was once united as one people and, in its overweening pride, started to build a tower to reach the heavens. God decided to stop the project and did so without resorting to fire or brimstone. He simply confused the languages of the participants. Pretty soon, work on the project stopped, and humanity never spoke with a single tongue again. The place was called Babel as a result.

Today, humanity — or rather, the computer industry — dissatisfied with the mere 6,000-odd human languages, has created some 8,000 computer languages. The number of human languages is on the decline, by the way, while the number of computer languages persists in climbing. In a world where everybody claims to want to be able to talk to everybody else, such a multiplicity of languages indicates that there's definitely a fly in the IT ointment.

My Computer Is a Lousy Linguist

So here's the problem: The world of computing is awash with programming languages. Even though there is a tendency for many computer users to try to agree on one programming language or another, this attempt to standardize always seems to fail. And even if the attempt succeeded, the world would still be left with millions of applications written in older languages — applications that are still needed by millions of users. Think we're exaggerating? Well, we could tell you of applications that ...