Therefore, for the purpose of understanding
the concepts presented in this book, you can safely ignore the protocol portion
of SAML.
Also note that WS-Federation, brie?¬‚y described in the section with the same
name later in this chapter, presents a certain degree of overlap with the functionalities
offered by the SAML speci?¬?cation; however WS-Federation is fully integrated
in WS-* and works well with any part of it.
154 Hints Toward a Solution
WS-MetadataExchange
WSDL and WS-Policy provide means to describe the web
service to the world, or better, they help de?¬?ne the ways in
which external callers are supposed to interact with the service
itself. In the ?¬?rst years of web service existence, those
documents were acquired by potential callers out of band or
leveraging features of the speci?¬?c web service stack implementation.
For example, the Microsoft stack made the WSDL of a
service available at one special address, obtained by attaching
the string ????WSDL??? to the address of the service itself. As the
web service??“based transactions grew in complexity, it became
clear that there was the need to de?¬?ne how to acquire service
metadata in a standard and programmatic fashion.
Pages:
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265