“City of Text” from the 1995 film, Hackers
(Image courtesy of Artem Visual Effects.)
Currently, Amblit Navigator has several service agents which use Microsoft .Net and SOAP based services. As new, appealing services are offered based on these standards, Amblit will continue to incorporate them into our service offering.
Microsoft .Net
From Microsoft’s web site (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973850.aspx):
.NET is the Microsoft solution for XML Web services, the next generation of software that connects our world of information, devices, and people in a unified, personalized way.
.NET technology enables the creation and use of XML-based applications, processes, and Web sites as services that share and combine information and functionality with each other by design, on any platform or smart device, to provide tailored solutions for organizations and individual people.
.NET is a comprehensive family of products, built on industry and Internet standards, that provide for each aspect of developing (tools), managing (servers), using (building block services and smart clients) and experiencing (rich user experiences) XML Web services.
XML Web services let applications share data, and invoke capabilities from other applications without regard to how those applications were built, what operating system or platform they run on, and what devices are used to access them. While XML Web services remain independent of each other, they can loosely link themselves into a collaborating group that performs a particular task.
SOAP
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a lightweight protocol for the request and exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed (virtual) environment.
It too is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.
SOAP is currently used with HTTP and HTTP Extension Framework to provide a growing list of services.
For more information on SOAP, visit the SOAP’s standard group (http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP). For a list of available web based services that are based on SOAP, visit X Methods (Chris Peiris’s web site).
UDDI
UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) is a public registry, where one can publish and inquire about Web Services. A shared implementation based on a set of public specifications, UDDI itself is a Web Service that can be invoked both at design-time and run-time. By publishing to UDDI, a business increases its visibility as well as offers standard programmatic means of interacting with its web services to potential clients. For more information on UDDI, visit OASIS, an international consortium responsible for the development and promotion of the standard and registry (http://uddi.xml.org).