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Welcome to Epionet.com. Epionet is a leading provider of process and tools for Web Service-enabled development. We focus on web enabling business process and system integration through open standards technology.

This site provides a range of information and resources whether you are a Developer, an IT Manager, a member of the press, or just interested in Web Services.

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Web Services
A Web Service is a new type of XML-based Web Application. This new type of application is published, located, and invoked across the Web as a service. It is a modular, self contained and self describing application. A Web Service can be anything from a simple request to a complicated business process. It might provide flight arrival information or process credit card transactions. When the Web Service Application is deployed, other applications (whether Web Services or not) can find and invoke it.

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Epionet.com Web Service resources
The Web Services section of Epionet.com offers you a number of resources:

• Web Service-related events
• Books and articles of interest
• Frequently asked questions on Web Services
• Links
• More on Web Services resources

What is WSDL?
We need a common language for describing Web Services. If we are providing a service, we need to be able to describe it to the world, and if we want to use a service, we need to be able to describe what we are looking for.

WSDL was designed with this in mind. WSDL stands for Web Service Definition Language. In order to successfully call a Web service you will need to know how to get to the service, what operations the service supports, what parameters the service expects, and what the service returns. WSDL provides all of this information in an XML document that can be read or machine-processed. It does this by defining an XML grammar for describing network services as collections of communication endpoints that can exchange messages.

WSDL service definitions provide documentation for distributed systems and serve as a recipe for automating the details involved in applications communication A WSDL file is an XML document that describes a set of SOAP messages and how the messages are exchanged.

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