Technology & Consulting

Technology is the Achilles of many organizations. Let us help you with your technology so you can focus on revenue generating activities. We can audit existing technology architecture or work with you from the very start to define appropriate technologies.

Our understanding of web services, architecture and technologies allows us to analyze your systems requirements and create recommendations that will help optimize performance. We can perform exploratory work to uncover potential issues and solutions even when the technologies required are not a native service to our business.

The Technical Side of Web Services

What Are Web Services?

Web services are a collection of protocols and standards that are used to exchange data between applications or systems. In other words a unit of code that can be activated using HTTP requests. Exposing your code over a network allows other applications to use the functionality of your program. The goal of a web service is to allow applications of different languages to communicate with each other via a common language. Web services can be summarized as a service that is:

• Available via internet or intranet networks
• Uses XML messaging systems
• Can function on multiple operating systems
• Is self describing via common XML grammar
• Can be discovered using a find mechanism

Service Oriented Architecture

SOA in relation to computer software, is a form of architectural pattern design where application components provide services to other components via a communications protocol like HTTP over a network. These services are designed to work in conjunction with a variety of vendors, products and technologies.

Web services are often the technology used in service-oriented architectures where a collection of services communicate via data transfer. In order for the SOA to work effectively there must be a clear definition of what a service is. We can define a service as well-defined and self contained function, or procedure that does not depend on the context or state of other services in order to run.

Web Architecture

The technologies and principal ideas that allow internet based programs to communicate with each other

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the method of data transfer used to exchange messages on the web

XML

Extensible Markup Language is the rules we follow to create human and machine readable documents

JSON

JavaScript Object Notation is a simplified alternative to XML used to transmit data between servers and web applications

API

Application Program Interface specifies how software components are designed and allowed to interact with each other while building software applications or programs