Web services from spec point of view

[Taariq San]

Hi there, lost my login, new email too, yadda yadda yadda.

Before I get to learning web services our spec guys want some info from me.
They need to have an idea of what to tell our clients who'll be developing ahead of me.

I think xml schema, any security considerations?

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm not sure what exactly it is you're asking; can you elaborate a bit?

[Taariq San]

Sure thing, forgive me if it ends up too detailed, and ask if there's not enough.
Thanks for the hand.

My client wants to expose some of it's transactions to their clients.
A transaction in this case being a typical use case scenario.

We've done this with https as well as sockets already, using existing transactions but without the front end and populating all the input fields.

Instead of displaying the result of that transaction to the end user we send back some XML or write strings to the socket.
That was done to support existing external interfaces when we replaced the client's old system with this Java one.

All new interfaces will be web services and our spec team has to tell those new external users how they can expect to use our functionality, which of course doesn't yet exist and there are some other items on my todo list before I get to fleshing that out.

I am hoping I can give them everything they need to get started, the input to send and the output to expect are probably the main bits.
I just don't want to mess them about by forgetting all sorts of web service specific things.

[Ulf Dittmer]

The usual way of communicating a web service API to a 3rd party is by giving them the WSDL. That described the operations possible, and the data types of the parameters and results. It may reference an XML schema where those types are defined, but that's optional.

So the first step would be define the API -the operations, parameters, and return types- and turn that into a WSDL description. That way the customer can start writing the client software without having to wait for you to complete the implementation.

[Taariq San]

Originally posted by Ulf Dittmer:
The usual way of communicating a web service API to a 3rd party is by giving them the WSDL. That described the operations possible, and the data types of the parameters and results. It may reference an XML schema where those types are defined, but that's optional.

So the first step would be define the API -the operations, parameters, and return types- and turn that into a WSDL description. That way the customer can start writing the client software without having to wait for you to complete the implementation.