WebServices Questions What is web services?

It is middleware technology developed in XML to exchange the data between multiple platforms and languages.
what is rest protocol ?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. (It is sometimes spelled

"ReST".) o REST is a lightweight alternative to mechanisms like RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, et al.). Later, we will see how much more simple REST is. o Despite being simple, REST is fully-featured; there's basically nothing you can do in Web Services that can't be done with a RESTful architecture. o REST is not a "standard". There will never be a W3C recommendation for REST, for example. And while there are REST programming frameworks, working with REST is so simple that you can often "roll your own" with standard library features in languages like Perl, Java, or C#.
What is SOAP?

o SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol is a communication protocol, a way to structure data before transmitting it, is based on XML standard. It is developed to allow communication between applications of different platforms and programming languages via internet. o It can use range of protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, Post office protocal 3(POP3) to carry documents. o Http-Get, Http-Post works with name/value pair which means transferring complex object is not possible with these protocols, whereas SOAP serializes complex structure, such as ASP.NET DataSets, complex arrays, custom types and XML nodes before transmitting and thus allows exchange of complex objects between applications. o Two components can easily communicate using Remote Procedure Calls protocol. But because of their compatibility and security issues, most of firewalls and proxy server block this type of messages. SOAP uses HTTP channel to transport which makes it widely accepted protocal over the internet.
What is WSDL?

WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language, an XML-based language that describes Web services and how to access and locate them.
What is UDDI?

UDDI stands for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. It is an open, Internet-based specification that offers directory service for storing information about web services.
Explain in brief different distributed technologies.

The need of distributed technologies arises with the requirement of distributed computing applications. The distributed computing allows partitioning of application logic into units and spreading the unit over different computers of a network or across different networks. This helps in spreading out loads over many computers. The components once developed can be reuse by other applications. There are many technologies developed to allow the distribution and reuse of application logic.
Advantages of the distributed components:

The key benefit of having distributed components is that they spread out the load over different machines. The components can be upgraded without disturbing the client's code. The distributed application improves security. For example, a company who has many agents wouldn't like those agents to have direct access to its database. Instead, these agents can be granted access to the components running on the corporate server which can be controlled and restricted.
Web services vs. CORBA and DCOM.

Web services o Web services use HTTP protocol for sending and receiving messages between the applications. o The data encoding in web services is based on XML. o Web services are defined using WSDL (Web Services Description Language). o Web services are discovered using UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). o Web services are firewalls friendly. o Web services supports interoperability i.e. cross platform integration is possible. CORBA and DCOM o These technologies use non-standard protocol, i.e. CORBA uses IIOP (Inter Internet Object Protocol), and DCOM uses RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)

o CORBA components are defined using CORBA Interface Description Language; DCOM components are defined using Microsoft Interface definition languages o CORBA components are discovered using the CORBA registry, DCOM using the Registry. o DCOM is a proprietary protocol that does not support interoperability and has firewall problems as DCOM transfers data in binary format and it uses many ports to call remote functions. o CORBA uses the IIOP protocol, which is non-Internet friendly. o CORBA and DCOM are fine for building enterprise applications that runs on the same platform and not good enough for applications that span platforms and languages.
Advantages of Web Services

o Web Services are supported on a wide range of platforms. o Web services may extend its interface and add new methods without affecting the clients as long as they still provide the old methods and parameters. o A client makes a request to a web service, the web service returns the result, and the connection is closed. There is no permanent connection. This makes it easy to scale up and support many clients at a time. o Firewalls can pose a challenge for distributed object technologies. The only thing that almost always gets through firewalls is HTTP traffic on ports 80 and 443. Because web services use HTTP, they can pass through firewalls without explicit configuration
Explain in brief Web Service Standards.

Following are the standards used by web services: o WSDL: WSDL is used to create interface definition for a web services. It describes all about methods to the client, i.e. methods available in a web service, their parameters and return values. o SOAP: SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol is a communication protocol, a way to structure data, based on XML. The web services use SOAP message format to encode information before sending. o HTTP: The SOAP message format in web services uses HTTP as communication protocol, i.e. SOAP messages are sent over HTTP channels. o DISCO: It is used to create discovery documents that provide links to multiple web service endpoints. The DISCO standard creates a single file that groups a list of related web services. A company can publish a DISCO file on its server that contains

links to all the web services it provides. o UDDI: A standard for creating business registries that catalog companies, the web services they provide, and the corresponding URLs for their WSDL contracts.
Define the specifications that help in the discovery of a web service.

DISCO : DISCO, an abbreviation of discovery, is a file that groups together a list

of related web services. A company that offers web services publishes a DISCO file on its server that has links of all the web services it provides. The client requests this file to see all the available web services. This standard is useful when client already know about a company that offers web services. You can also use DISCO standard while working in local network. It is not helpful to find all web services over the internet. o UDDI : UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) offers centralized directory for web services over the internet. It hosts web services from different companies and can be used by the clients to find web services of their specific need. To make web services shared publicly, they have to be published in UDDI.
How you define web service protocol stack?

It is basically set of various protocols that can be used to explore and execute web services. The entire stack has four layers i.e. Service Transport, XML Messaging, Service Description and Service Discovery..
Can you define each of these layers of protocol stack?

The Service Transport layer transfer messages between different applications, such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP, and Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP). The XML Messaging layer encodes messages in XML format so that messages can be understood at each end, such as XML-RPC and SOAP. The Service Description layer describes the user interface to a web service, such as WSDL. The Service Discovery layer centralizes services to a common registry and offer simple publish functionality, such as UDDI.
Define XML RPC?

It is a protocol that makes use of XML messages to do Remote Procedure Calls.

What kind of security is needed for web services?

The security level for web services should be more than that of what we say Secure Socket Layer (SSL). This level of security can be only achieved from Entrust Secure Transaction Platform. Web services need this level of security to ensure reliable transactions and secure confidential information .

Define Entrust Entitlements Service?

This service verifies entities that attempt to access a web service. For Example, the authentication service, the Entitlements Service ensures security in business operations.
Define Entrust Privacy Service?

As its name implies, it deals with security and confidentiality. This service encrypts data to ensure that only concerned parties can access the data.
What do you mean by PKI?

It means Public-Key Infrastructure.

What tools are used to test a web service?

I have used SoapUI for SOAP WS and Firefox poster plugin for RESTFul Services.
Differentiate between a SOA and a Web service?

SOA is a design and architecture to implement other services. SOA can be easily implemented using various protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, JMS, SMTP, RMI, IIOP, RPC etc. While Web service, itself is an implemented technology. In fact one can implement SOA using the web service.
What is REST?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. REST itself is not a standard, while it uses various standards such as HTTP, URL, XML/HTML/GIF/JPEG (Resource Representations) and text/xml, text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, etc (MIME Types).
Differentiate between .NET Web Services and .NET Remoting?

As far as protocol is concerned, .NET Web Service uses HTTP, while, .NET Remoting uses any protocol i.e. TCP/HTTP/SMTP. When it comes to performance, .NET Remoting is comparatively, faster than.NET Web Service. Also, as .NET Web Services are hosted via IIS, therefore, it is far more reliable than the .NET Remoting.
Explain few disadvantages of Response Caching?

Response Caching is useless or incompetent when method accepts extensive amount of values because caching means to store lot of information. Also, if the method depends on external source of information, and that are not provided within the parameters then such methods are bypassed.
What is the alternate solution to Response Caching?

One can use Data Caching (System.Web.Caching.Cach) instead of Response Caching.

Brief few drawbacks of using GET and POST methods to communicate with the web service?

These methods are less secure and inhibit users to pass structures and objects as arguments. Also, it doesn't allow users to pass ByRef arguments.
How a SOAP message is structured?

A SOAP message is consists of SOAP Envelope, SOAP Headers, and SOAP Body.
Can you name different kinds of web services?

There are two types of web services in total i.e. SOAP based web service and RESTful web service.
What's different in RESTful web services?

The RESTful web services contains no contract or WSDL file.

Give me few reasons to use RESTful web service?

The RESTFul web services are simple to implement and test. It supports various data formats such as XML, JSON etc.