About W3C (SOAP) Web Services
The W3C is a standards body that defines Web Services as follows:
"The World Wide Web is more and more used for application-to-application communication. The programmatic interfaces made available are referred to as Web services."
They provide a
set of recommendations for achieving this. An interoperability organization,
WS-I, seeks to achieve interoperability between W3C Web Services. The W3C specifications for SOAP and WSDL are required to meet the WS-I definition. Ehcache is using Glassfish's libraries to provide it's W3C web services. The project known as Metro follows the WS-I definition.
Finally,
OASIS defines a Web Services Security specification for SOAP: WS-Security. The current version is 1.1. It provides three main security mechanisms: ability to send security tokens as part of a message, message integrity, and message confidentiality. Ehcache's W3C Web Services support the stricter WS-I definition and use the SOAP and WSDL specifications. Specifically:
The method of operation is in the entity-body of the SOAP envelope and a HTTP header. POST is always used as the HTTP method.
The scoping information, used to identify the resource to perform the method on, is contained in the SOAP entity-body. The URI path is always the same for a given Web Service - it is the service “endpoint.”
The Web Service is described by and exposes a {WSDL} (Web Services Description Language) file. It contains the methods, their arguments and what data types are used.
The {WS-Security} SOAP extensions are supported.
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