Web Services Essential Terminology
This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 2, , on page 17, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014, .
The realm of web services is replete with terms, acronyms, and initialisms, such as:
- An RPC (remote procedure call) is a client process requesting that a server process execute a specific procedure on given parameter data and return the response.
- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a specification for structuring and transmitting XML-encoded web services messages, using any transport protocol, including HTTP and SMTP.
- REST (representational state transfer) is a lighter-weight alternative to RPC.
- WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML-based scheme for defining the capabilities (procedures, parameters, and response data types) of web services.
