TY - JOUR
T1 - Web Services Coordination for Business Transactions
AU - Zhang, Honglei
AU - Zhao, Wenbing
PY - 2008/1/1
Y1 - 2008/1/1
N2 - Many e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com, Yahoo. com, and eBay.com started to offer Web services to their partners and customers. Through such Web services, new value-added services could be provided and hence higher revenues would be generated. Essentially, the Web services technology is transforming the World Wide Web from a predominantly publishing platform to a programmable platform, which undoubtedly will make it easier to conduct business online, and enable automated business-to-business communications (Papazoglou, 2003). The Web services technology is particularly useful for Application Service Providers that offer various on-demand services and software- as-a-service (SAAS) to their customers (Chakrabarty, 2007). Such service-oriented computing is attractive to many businesses because they can save valuable resources and money by avoiding installing and maintaining sophisticated enterprise software on-site. Furthermore, most of business interactions are transactional, which require well-defined coordination support. To meet this requirement, a number of specifications have been proposed, and OASIS has recently rectified the Web Services Transactions specifications (Feingold & Jeyaraman, 2007; Freund & Little, 2007; Little & Wilkinson, 2007). In this chapter, we provide an overview of the Web services technology, together with the set of standard specifications for Web services transactions. The core components of the Web services technology include eXtensible Markup Language (XML), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Both SOAP and WSDL are based on XML. All these protocols and languages have the characteristic of strong extensibility, which lays a solid foundation for the success of the Web services technology. Due to the extensibility design, the protocols specified in the Web services transactions standards can be plugged into the Web services core seamlessly to provide the additional coordination needed for business transactions. Furthermore, we point out the need to protect the business transactions from the hardware failures and malicious faults, and for more robust coordination for Web services transactions.
AB - Many e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com, Yahoo. com, and eBay.com started to offer Web services to their partners and customers. Through such Web services, new value-added services could be provided and hence higher revenues would be generated. Essentially, the Web services technology is transforming the World Wide Web from a predominantly publishing platform to a programmable platform, which undoubtedly will make it easier to conduct business online, and enable automated business-to-business communications (Papazoglou, 2003). The Web services technology is particularly useful for Application Service Providers that offer various on-demand services and software- as-a-service (SAAS) to their customers (Chakrabarty, 2007). Such service-oriented computing is attractive to many businesses because they can save valuable resources and money by avoiding installing and maintaining sophisticated enterprise software on-site. Furthermore, most of business interactions are transactional, which require well-defined coordination support. To meet this requirement, a number of specifications have been proposed, and OASIS has recently rectified the Web Services Transactions specifications (Feingold & Jeyaraman, 2007; Freund & Little, 2007; Little & Wilkinson, 2007). In this chapter, we provide an overview of the Web services technology, together with the set of standard specifications for Web services transactions. The core components of the Web services technology include eXtensible Markup Language (XML), HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Both SOAP and WSDL are based on XML. All these protocols and languages have the characteristic of strong extensibility, which lays a solid foundation for the success of the Web services technology. Due to the extensibility design, the protocols specified in the Web services transactions standards can be plugged into the Web services core seamlessly to provide the additional coordination needed for business transactions. Furthermore, we point out the need to protect the business transactions from the hardware failures and malicious faults, and for more robust coordination for Web services transactions.
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U2 - 10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch650
DO - 10.4018/978-1-60566-026-4.ch650
M3 - Article
SP - 4070
EP - 4076
JO - Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology: Second Edition
JF - Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology: Second Edition
ER -