Protocols

Abstract

Today’s enterprises increasingly rely on the Web to support their operations, global business, and integration of their business processes with those of their suppliers, partners, and customers. This requires that the architecture and design of business systems and applications should allow collaboration among distributed software components. The attempts to support collaboration and integration of heterogeneous systems led to the creation of a number of protocols and middleware. To mention a few, Common Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), and Java-based Remote Method Invocation (RMI) have been developed and widely used. In addition, supporting pipelines (communication protocols) have emerged over the years. There are many protocols used in building large Web service applications or portals. This section introduces two main protocols — Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and explains the properties of URI, URL, and URN.