Overview
How BankVal Works
Technical Details

Cookbook

Service Information
F.A.Q.s

What is a web service?
What is SOAP?
What is WSDL?
What is a SOAP toolkit?

What is a web service?

A Web service is any application that makes itself available over the Internet for use by other software systems.

Other software systems may interact with the web service over the internet using a standard web protocol. In most cases the protocol used is SOAP. Microsoft.NET is built around the SOAP technology.

The web service public interfaces are defined and described in enough detail for other systems to interact with them. This description is usually provided in an XML document called a Web Services Description Language (WSDL).

Web services are the next step in the evolution of distributed systems.

What is SOAP?

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the communications protocol for XML web services such as BankVal. It is standardized by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

It is an XML based messaging technology, which provides a structural way to format data, to describe what the service does and make the service available to others.

The SOAP protocol gives a general description of the XML that should be used to call web services and the response generated by a web service.

What is WSDL?

WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML document that describes the interface of a specific web service in enough detail to allow a user to build a client application to call it. The WSDL for a service such as BankVal will specify, among other things, the parameters passed to the service (parameter name, data types etc.), the results returned from the service and the actual location of the service (URL).

What is a SOAP toolkit ?

A SOAP toolkit is used to generate and interpret the SOAP messages that are passed between your system and BankVal. It is possible to write a program to process the raw XML messages but it is much simpler to to use a toolkit to do this. There are free toolkits for most programming languages and instructions on how to get a toolkit for your programming language are given in the Cookbook.