A web service is any collection of software operations or methods available over the internet that uses a standardized XML messaging system. XML is used to encode all communications to a web service operation: a client invokes a web service operation by sending an XML message and then waits for a corresponding XML response.
The web services can be accessed from any client that can use standard web service protocol. The web services provide access to a large amount of functionality that can be used to automate business processes and reduce manual data entry. There are several web services available, each providing access to functionality for a different area of the product. For example, the UserService web service provides a getUser method and an editUser method that can be used to manage information about users, while the BusinessUnitService web service provides similar functionality regarding business units. This set of web services constitutes an application programming interface (API) for CA Service Catalog.
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a lightweight, XML-based communication protocol and encoding format for inter-application communication.
The CA Service Catalog implementation of SOAP is entirely Axis-compliant. The Web Services that CA Service Catalog exposes can be accessed from any Axis-compliant client. Implementers can use any programming language with which they are familiar to call exposed methods, using method call syntax. Knowledge of the use of web services from the chosen programming language is required. This implementation supports the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), which allows you to easily build stubs to access remote services, and also to automatically export machine-readable descriptions of CA Service Catalog deployed services from Axis.
This chapter explains how to set up the Web Services, including options for deploying and undeploying web services. This chapter also provides examples of accessing the web services through different SOAP clients written in Java and JavaScript.
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