UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL: The Web Services Specification Reference Book

Web Services themselves are language-independent; you can write them in Java, C#, or, in theory, any language. However, at the heart of Web Services are three protocols for making code modules known to each other and for facilitating communication among them. UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL: The Web Services Specification Reference Book contains, verbatim, the standards documents that define these three programming tools, as originally published online by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and UDDI.org. Specifically, the document list includes all the schema documents and Application Program Interface (API) references that define how the standards work (a dozen papers in total). The editor has added no content of his own, choosing instead to let the standards documents stand together as a definition of Web Services.

Certainly, you can get every one of these documents on the Internet, completely free of charge. The value in this work is in convenience. Everything is uniformly formatted and printed out for you, with a table of contents that spans all 12 documents. It's pretty handy if you have a need to cite chapter and verse on some aspect of SOAP messaging or UDDI indexing. However, this book would be significantly more valuable if it had an index that spanned all the documents. Such a feature would allow you to, for example, quickly see what different specifications say about MIME binding. As it is, there's no book-wide index at all. Similarly useful would be a searchable version of the document collection on CD-ROM or on a Web site. That would allow you to do the same thing. --David Wall

Topics covered: The standards documents that define Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) 1.0, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1.