Bottom-up methodology - A service identification methodology. In this case, the business logic is already available from a legacy application. It simply needs to be externalized via a Web service, ESB, or the like.

Business Process Document - The business process document captures the interaction between businesses or different systems in a business.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) – An XML-based language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols. BPEL extends the Web services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. It is the result of a cross-company initiative between IBM, BEA and Microsoft to develop a universally supported process-related language.

Dynamic Web Services - Used to describe conditions when the service provider and the service requestor are not aware of each other at design time. Typically, the Service Provider publishes the WSDL document specifying the service description and accessibility to a registry (such as UDDI) and the Service Requestor searches the registry for a particular service required. Once the service is located, the service requestor uses the WSDL file to get the information to communicate with the service provider.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) – It is an emerging architecture for integrating enterprise applications in an implementation-independent fashion, at a coarse-grained service level and using a message-oriented, event-driven paradigm.

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) – XML is an open, standard data representation language. A flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. It is extensively used in enterprise application deployment descriptors.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – A standard method of transferring data between a Web server and a Web browser. Web pages displayed in a browser are typically transferred from the server using HTTP (hence the address: http://…).

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) – SOAP is a simple and lightweight XML-based protocol for exchanging information in a decentralized, distributed environment

Service - A service is a network-accessible endpoint that is configurable, composable, and abstracts its details via a well-defined and standards-based interface.

• IBM’s classic definition indicates that a Web service has six qualities: self-contained, self-describing, modular, publishable, discoverable, and invocable.
• ZapThink’s definition also includes six qualities: loosely coupled, policy driven, inherently integrated, legacy friendly, metadata constrained, and interface defined.

SOA – Service Oriented Architecture. Depending upon the context, the meaning changes:

• a technical architecture supported by standard protocols and data formats
• an approach to designing information systems that exposes enterprise assets as configurable actors within a dynamic business process
• a new business paradigm that synchronizes the goals of the board room (execs) and server room (IT)

SOAD – Service Oriented Analysis & Design. Formal methodology for gathering requirements, analyzing the requirements to identify services and business processes and finally implementing the services and processes.

Static Web Services – Static Web services are used when the service provider and the service requestor are aware of each other at design time. The various pieces of information required to connect each other are hard coded in the WSDL file (Service description).

Top-down methodology – One of the service identication methodologies. In this case, a specification (WSDL) exists and a new implementation needs to be created. First the WSDL is located and then a skeletal service is generated from the WSDL and implemented.

Universal Discovery Description Integration (UDDI) - UDDI is a specification for publishing and discovering information about Web services. It is an XML-based standard for describing, publishing, and finding services in a distributed environment through the use of a registry server.

Web Services - A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using formatted messages (typically SOAP), typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.

Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) - WSDL is an XML based language used to describe Web Services and how to locate them. It provides information on what the service is about, where it resides and how it can be invoked.

XSD (XML Schema Document) - A language for specifying the grammar of the markup allowed in an XML file. It describes the structure of an XML document. It is functionally similar to a DTD but is limited to XML files.