Web services are a set of tools that can be used in a number of ways. The three most common styles of use are RPC, SOA and REST.
Remote procedure calls
RPC Web services present a distributed function (or method) call interface that is familiar to many developers. Typically, the basic unit of RPC Web services is the WSDL operation.
The first Web services tools were focused on RPC, and as a result this style is widely deployed and supported. However, it is sometimes criticised for not being loosely coupled, because it was often implemented by mapping
XML data binding refers to the process of representing the information in an XML document as an object in computer memory. This allows applications to access the data in the XML from the object rather than using the DOM to retrieve the data from a direct representation of the XML itself.
An XML data binder accomplishes this by creating a mapping between elements of the XML schema of the document we wish to bind and members of a class to be represented in memory.
When this process is applied to convert an XML document to an object, it is called
Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is a proposed data format
from the Efficient XML Interchange Working Group of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is one of the various
efforts to encode XML documents in a binary data format,
rather than plain text.
Using a binary XML format generally can reduce the
verbosity of XML documents and cost of parsing.
The EXI format is derived from the Agile Delta efficient
XML format[1].
Semantic Web at Work?
Uche Ogbuji wrote a good article on XML.com here is a summary: “I’m still getting my
XForms is an XML format for the specification of a data processing model for XML data and user interface(s) for the XML data, such as web forms. XForms was designed to be the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms, but is generic enough that it can also be used in a standalone manner or with presentation languages other than XHTML to describe a user interface and a set of common data manipulation tasks.
XForms, much like XHTML 2.0 which is currently under development as of November 2006 and within which XForms will be embedded, differs from previous
An XML Schema Definition (XSD) is an instance of an XML schema written in XML Schema. An XSD defines a type of XML document in terms of constraints upon what elements and attributes may appear, their relationship to each other, what types of data may be in them, and other things. It can be used with validation software in order to ascertain whether a particular XML document is of that type, and to produce a PSVI.
XSDs were the first W3C-recommended XML schemas to provide a namespace and datatype aware alternative to using XML's native Document Type
XPointer is a system for addressing components of XML based internet media.
At the present time (late 2002), XPointer is divided among four specifications: a "framework" which forms the basis for identifying XML fragments, a positional element addressing scheme, a scheme for namespaces, and a scheme for XPath-based addressing.
The XPointer language is designed to address structural aspects of XML, including text content and other information objects created as a result of parsing the document. Thus, it could be used to point to a section of a