. The essence of net--xml and soap

Internet applications are growing, but our Internet programming is still in the Stone Age. Internet users, like users on a time-sharing terminal of an older host, request information from a protected resource and wait for a response. The information that you receive from the Internet site you are browsing is made up of HTML based information that it wishes to provide to you.

But is it more fun to interact with a remote Web site? If we can somehow access the computing power provided by the remote site and take advantage of its services, and not just take advantage of its ability to publish, would it be better? This is what. NET will provide.

. NET combines the computing power provided by a remote server with the traffic necessary to allow user interaction. Specifically,. NET is designed for you-internet developers-it helps you create new capabilities that can be augmented. Instead of being an island in the ocean of bandwidth, your Internet site can build your site in such a way that it is integrated into the Internet through collaboration and interoperability.

The key to all this, of course, is the ability to cooperate. To be interoperable, data is shared with high-speed data transfer rates. How do you do this? NET happened today rather than five years ago?

Part of the answer, of course, lies in the network technology we are in today. There have never been so many people with high-speed bandwidth connections, and more people will join in in the near future. Imagine a time when everyone has a DSL, Cable Modem or broadband wireless connection ... It's hard to recall the age of 300 Potter modems.

In the past few years, two of the most critical advances have been in the introduction of XML and its application in SOAP. These technologies are at the heart of. NET. To be a leader in the. NET development world, you must understand XML and SOAP.

。 NET Technology

You may have read a few articles about what. NET is and what it is made of ... NET allows us to share information and interact at the service level rather than at the level of release. Microsoft's support for. NET products and a number of components, content, and features from third parties have the internal structure of. Net. But naturally, a question is raised: "What makes. NET work?"

All of this starts with XML.

Implementing data coding with XML

To understand. NET, you need to understand XML. Like the language we speak and write in our own communication, XML, extensible Markup Language, Extensible Markup Language, is the basis of. Net. Perhaps we have great ideas and information to share, but if we can't express our thoughts and information in a way that other people can understand, our hard work and thoughts can only lie there and sleep. XML is the soul of. NET and is the foundation of all. Net present and future. The database will be read and written through the recordset in the XML, and the Web browser will accept the XML and display it along with its accompanying style sheet, and Visual Studio will even produce XML code! Without understanding XML and the technology associated with it, you cannot communicate with the resources that support. NET, whether it is a site or People!

For today's WEB servers, XML is almost ubiquitous. Almost all computing platforms are able to parse XML so that the content in an XML document can be obtained. Windows can, Linux can, of course, MVS and VMS can also. Even cellular phones can! So, if we can find a way to get an XML document from a remote system, the problem is how to understand the data contained in the document. At this point, we carry XML documents through SOAP.

Implementing data communication with soap

For a long time we have used Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP to provide WEB pages and the content of transactions. But when we combine HTTP or some other Internet transport protocols with XML and specify the format of the XML document itself, you get a Simple Object Access Protocol soap. At least when it was first conceived, soap was designed to pass remote method calls from the local system to the distant system. Unlike the other remote architectures of the era,-dcom, CORBA, and RMI, SOAP protocols can traverse the firewalls of any community, and SOAP packets contain XML-encoded data. Moreover, they are easy to analyze and use. SOAP also has great scalability, which allows us to serve a very good number of users at the same time.

The original idea of the SOAP model was to use the request-response model, which is similar to the Internet computing model we are using today. Subsequently, SOAP developed to include the message model. The difference is that SOAP has a special purpose for obtaining results when it encodes a method parameter on a remote system. It does not request a WEB site to provide a data table of interest, on the contrary, for example, on the same system I can invoke a remote call supposedly called calculatepayment () and receive a personal payment value. Yes, today you can do this with a form, but the key is that there is a difference between invoking the service and submitting the form. Service invocation is a more powerful concept.

。 NET: Data sharing platform

Give me a language XML and a means of communication SOAP, I can build a system that allows us to interact and collaborate. This is. NET. Initially, Microsoft will build this powerful share, and then they will need some time to put the original version in the public domain. If. NET works as expected, it will change our computing habits and business practices, as DOS and Windows have done in the last 20 years. Predictably, sites that encourage users to interact with and serve Web consumers will prosper. These sites don't get into trouble or even die out, as Internet consumers are becoming more aware that they need enhanced services.

Fat client computing has not died out, but thin client computing is becoming more popular in the marketplace. As a developer or project manager, it is incumbent on you to learn the latest concepts and technologies and apply them to business practices. Remember Darwin's Holy Word: evolution is in the making, but natural selection is also on the rise.