Terminology

The following terms are included in these topics:

Term	Definition
Web Service	Web service as a software service exposed on the Web through SOAP, described with a WSDL file and registered in UDDI. Web services are the fundamental building blocks in the move to distributed computing on the Internet.
SOAP	As the communications protocol for Web services, SOAP is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework, which provides a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols. The framework has been designed to be independent of any particular programming model and other implementation specific semantics.
WSDL	WSDL (often pronounced whiz-dull) stands for Web Services Description Language. A WSDL file is an XML document that describes a set of SOAP messages and how the messages are exchanged. WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services).