Service Development Glossary

An activity is a basic unit of work that performs a specific function in a business process.

A concrete protocol and format specification for a particular interface. The binding process links each service or business process connection profile for a Sybase project to the endpoint physical resource.

A canvas is the graphical user interface (GUI) of an editor on which business processes and elements of business processes are created, maintained, and viewed.

A complex activity is a composite of activities and has drill-down capabilities.

A composite service is built from invocations of other services and user-defined logic. Using the appropriate editor, you can incorporate the invocations of other services into both a business process or Java composite service. Then you can construct the logic for a business process service graphically using the editor and for a composite Java service using Java code.

Deployment is the process of transferring application metadata from a design-time environment to a runtime environment.

Enterprise JavaBeans

An endpoint is a physical instance or implementation of a particular resource type. For example, a database endpoint specifies a particular database instance used in the tooling through a connection profile. The endpoint for a Java service is the Java source file that implements that service. Other examples are Java classes, stored procedures, and Web services.

Part of the process of making a service publicly accessible. After the transport is specified, the interfaces that will be exposed over the transport must be specified.

A message definition is a metadata description of a message type. In a message definition every data element is represented as a hierarchy of nodes. There are two types of nodes: container and field.

An operation is an abstract description of an action that is supported by a service. An operation definition contains an abstract description of the business documents to be exchanged and indicates whether the port will send a document, receive a document, or both.

A perspective is an arrangement of views and editors. A perspective provides the interface to tools associated with accomplishing a specific type of task.

Services are self-describing application modules that provide access to business logic and data in networked software components. All endpoints are modeled as services by using WSDL documents that contain a set of operations and can be used in a business process.

The languages and codes that define the service contract between an implementation and the clients of that implementation. The service interface allows the actual implementation to be abstracted because an implementation following the interface (contract) is appropriate for a given client.

Service-Oriented Architecture allows design and development that are not tied to a platform or a language.

Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP is a lightweight XML-based communication protocol used to encode the information in Web service request and response messages before sending them over a network. SOAP messages are independent of any operating system or protocol and may be transported using a variety of Internet protocols, including SMTP, MIME, and HTTP. For additional information, see http://www.w3.org.

Service Oriented Development of Applications represents the service-oriented programming style of software development. With this style, SODA applies the concepts of a service-oriented architecture to the design of a single application where applications are created from software services.

A service that retains a session context, and all service processing completes within the scope of two or more request/events. A stateful service is always transactional because it requires the use of a transactional resource, such as a database or a queue.

A service that has no session context, and all service processing completes within the scope of a single request/event. A stateless service is transactional only if it contains a transactional resource, such as a database or a queue.

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration. UDDI is a standard protocol for Web-accessible servers. UDDI provides a platform-independent framework to find and register services and is used to support the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the repository connection. UDDI is similar to a traditional phone book yellow and white pages for Web services. A UDDI registry stores descriptions about companies and the services they offer in a common XML format so their services can be discovered by others.

A UDDI registry is a server that implements the UDDI protocol standard to store and publish Web services. Several UDDI registries are publicly accessible. For example, IBM, SAP, and Sybase host UDDI registries on publicly accessible servers. A public UDDI registry means anyone can search for Web services offered by various organizations.

A view is similar to a pane and exists within a perspective. A view provides ways to navigate and work with information.

A Web service is a software resource that initiates and responds to service requests. A Web service can be discovered and run over the Internet using agreed-upon standards such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL.

Web Services Description Language. WSDL is a general purpose XML language for describing interface, protocol bindings, and deployment details of network services. As an XML-formatted language, WSDL is used to describe the capabilities of a Web service as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages. The WSDL details the available methods and parameters types as well as the actual SOAP endpoint for a service. For more information, see http://www.w3.org.

Web Services Invocation Framework, an open-source Java API for invoking Web services based on information provided in WSDL files. For more information, see http://ws.apache.org/wsif/.