Web Services Architecture Guide
1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose of the Web Service Architecture
Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. This document (WSA) is intended to provide a common definition of a Web service, and define its place within a larger Web services framework to guide the community. The WSA provides a conceptual model and a context for understanding Web services and the relationships between the components of this model.
The architecture does not attempt to specify how Web services are implemented, and imposes no restriction on how Web services might be combined. The WSA describes both the minimal characteristics that are common to all Web services, and a number of characteristics that are needed by many, but not all, Web services.
The Web services architecture is an interoperability architecture: it identifies those global elements of the global Web services network that are required in order to ensure interoperability between Web services.
1.2 Intended Audience
This document is intended for a diverse audience. Expected readers include Web service specification authors, creators of Web service software, people making decisions about Web service technologies, and others.
1.3 Document Organization
This document has two main sections: a core concepts section (2 Concepts and Relationships ) and a stakeholder’s perspectives section (3 Stakeholder’s Perspectives).
2 Concepts and Relationships provides the bulk of the conceptual model on which conformance constraints could be based. For example, the resource concept states that resources have identifiers (in fact they have URIs). Using this assertion as a basis, we can assess conformance to the architecture of a particular resource by looking for its identifier. If, in a given instance of this architecture, a resource has no identifier, then it is not a valid instance of the architecture.
While the concepts and relationships represent an enumeration of the architecture, the stakeholders’perspectives approaches from a different viewpoint: how the architecture meets the goals and requirements. In this section we elucidate the more global properties of the architecture and demonstrate how the concepts actually achieve important objectives.
A primary goal of the Stakeholder’s Perspectives section is to provide a top-down view of the architecture from various perspectives. For example, in the 3.6 Web Services Security section we show how the security of Web services is addressed within the architecture. The aim here is to demonstrate that Web services can be made secure and indicate which key concepts and features of the architecture achieve that goal.
The key stakeholder’s perspectives supported in this document reflect the major goals of the architecture itself: interopability, extensibility, security, Web integration, implementation and manageability.
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