The Web service protocol stack is a collection of computer networking protocols that are used to define, locate, implement, and make Web services interact with each other. The Web service protocol stack mainly comprises four areas:
(Service) Transport Protocol: responsible for transporting messages between network applications and includes protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP, as well as the more recent Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP).
(XML) Messaging Protocol: responsible for encoding messages in a common XML format so that they can be understood at either end of a network connection. Currently, this area includes such protocols as XML-RPC, WS-Addressing, and SOAP.
(Service) Description Protocol: used for describing the public interface to a specific web service. The WSDL interface format is typically used for this purpose.
(Service) Discovery Protocol: centralizes services into a common registry such that network web services can publish their location and description, and makes it easy to discover what services are available on the network. At present, the UDDI API is normally used for service discovery.
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