The Ultimate Guide for Designing and Governing Web Service Contracts

For Web services to succeed as part of SOA, they require balanced, effective technical contracts that enable services to be evolved and repeatedly reused for years to come. Now, a team of industry experts presents the first end-to-end guide to designing and governing Web service contracts. Writing for developers, architects, governance specialists, and other IT professionals, the authors cover the following areas:

Understanding Web Service Contract Technologies

Initial chapters and ongoing supplementary content help even the most inexperienced professional get up to speed on how all of the different technologies and design considerations relate to the creation of Web service contracts. For example, a visual anatomy of a Web service contract documented from logical and physical perspectives is provided, along with a chapter dedicated to describing namespaces in plain English. The book is further equipped with numerous case study examples and many illustrations.

Fundamental and Advanced WSDL

Tutorial coverage of WSDL 1.1 and 2.0 and detailed descriptions of their differences is followed by numerous advanced WSDL topics and design techniques, including extreme loose coupling, modularization options, use of extensibility elements, asynchrony, message dispatch, service instance identification, non-SOAP HTTP binding, and WS-BPEL extensions. Also explained is how WSDL definitions are shaped by key SOA design patterns.

Fundamental and Advanced XML Schema

XML Schema basics are covered within the context of Web services and SOA, after which advanced XML Schema chapters delve into a variety of specialized message design considerations and techniques, including the use of wildcards, reusability of schemas and schema fragments, type inheritance and composition, CRUD-style message design, and combining industry and custom schemas.

Fundamental and Advanced WS-Policy

Topics, such as Policy Expression Structure, Composite Policies, Operator Composition Rules, and Policy Attachment establish a foundation upon which more advanced topics, such as policy reusability and centralization, nested, parameterized, and ignorable assertions are covered, along with an exploration of creating concurrent policy-enabled contracts and designing custom policy assertions and vocabularies.

Fundamental Message Design with SOAP
A broad range of message design-related topics are covered, including SOAP message structures, SOAP nodes and roles, SOAP faults, designing custom SOAP headers and working with industry-standard SOAP headers.

Advanced Message Design with WS-Addressing

The art of message design is taken to a new level with in-depth descriptions of WS-Addressing endpoint references (EPRs) and MAP headers and an exploration of how they are applied via SOA design patterns. Also covered are WSDL binding considerations, related MEP rules, WS-Addressing policy assertions, and detailed coverage of how WS-Addressing relates to SOAP Action values.

Advanced Message Design with MTOM, and SwA

Developing SOAP messages capable of transporting large documents or binary content is explored with a documentation of the MTOM packaging and serialization framework (including MTOM-related policy assertions), together with the SOAP with Attachments (SwA) standard and the related WS-I Attachments Profile.

Versioning Techniques and Strategies

Fundamental versioning theory starts off a series of chapters that dive into a variety of versioning techniques based on proven SOA design patterns including backward and forward compatibility, version identification strategies, service termination, policy versioning, validation by projection, concurrency control, partial understanding, and versioning with and without wildcards.

Web Service Contracts and SOA

The constant focus of this book is on the design and versioning of Web service contracts in support of SOA and service-orientation. Relevant SOA design principles and design patterns are periodically discussed to demonstrate how specific Web service technologies can be applied and further optimized. Furthermore, several of the advanced chapters provide expert techniques for designing Web service contracts while taking SOA governance considerations into account.