Glossary or Terms

API
A method of communication between two application programs where one application provides services to the other.

Application manager
An extensive Application management system which configures Applications within the Wave Builder. The Application Manager allows users to administrate and customise applications through the simple use of numerous core services.

Application intercommunication
The process by which separate applications or business services may exchange information either transparently on request. These business services remain independent and may exist on completely different systems, distributed over the Web.

Business services
Business services are Applications (or Application components), and the flexibility built into these services allows for functionality to be placed at any level in the enterprise system / portal site.

Application Services
Application Services represent sets of functionality for business commonalties. Having these reusable services as part of the development environment means not only rapid development, but also the deployment of Web Services based on reliable, heavily tested functionality.

eBuiseness
Refers to the use of web technology to streamline the interactions between companies, customers and suppliers.

eCommerce
An Internet term for online services involving real time remote commercial transactions, such as merchandise purchasing, banking, credit card transactions, brokerage, and more.

Encryption
Encoding of data to ensure privacy and secure communications in mission-critical applications. The traditional method uses a key such as DES, where both sender and receiver use the same key. The second method is public key cryptography, such as RSA, that uses both a public and private key. Each recipient has a private key that is kept secret and a public key used for message encryption. The recipient uses the private key to decipher the message.

Enterprise portal
A browser-based single entry point for accessing the entire scope of a particular company's business environment which is based on the user's business role.

Epiowave
Epiowave is Epionet’s complete solution for the development and deployment of Web Services and Enterprise Applications.  It consists of the EpioDesigner, EpioBuilder and EpioBusiness Server products.

EpioBuilder
EpioBuilder product includes the epionet framework architecture for Web Services-based Application development and deployment.

EpioBusinessServer
The EpioBusinessServer product is a web-based platform for the development and deployment of Web Services and Enterprise Applications. 

EpioDesigner
The EpioDesigner product is a complete process for designing and prototyping Web Services and Enterprise Applications, from the requirements analysis stage through to full prototype.  This includes web-based process management tools and unique project management software based on this process.

Extranet
The way a corporation implements the networking of its employees and key corporate customers and suppliers, using Internet-like tools and protocols. The result is a network environment which is not accessed by the public.

Firewall
A software program that runs on a separate server in order to prevent certain IP addresses from accessing the network, thus protecting the organization from potentially hostile Internet and Intranet users.

Epiowave Business Services Server
The BSS is an abstraction layer which deals with many varieties of business service intercommunication. It also provides a web service registry or library to users / developers anywhere on the web.

Internet
The global network of networks, all utilizing the "TCP/IP" protocol for communications. Due to its ability to enable users to automate many aspects of merchandising transactions, the Internet is considered the commercial platform of the 21st century.

Intranet
The use of Internet tools and protocols for the internal use of corporations for employees. Usually, it provides services like email, document sharing, scheduling, information availability, directories and database sharing.

Islands
Entities of data and functionality which, although related, exist separated within a business' process. Islands remain isolated by traditional technologies and drastically slow the web enabling of business process. This leads to need for much "e-red tape" between logical entities, all of which is dissolved by the epionet solution.

Epiowave Layout Manager
This refers essentially to the categorisation and layout management features of the EpioBusiness Server.  It enables the dynamic delivery to each individual user of a personalised navigation interface corresponding to that user's business role within the system. It forms part of the design time environment and the included Category Manager allow full control of menu systems and interface layout.

Platform
Any type of computer system. Macintosh, UNIX, Dos, Windows - these are all different computing platforms, capable of communicating only through agreed-upon protocols, such as TCP/IP.

Scalability
The ability to expand a computer- based service when its capacity is fully utilized, including the ability to add servers at different locations for the purpose of adding capacity. Scalability is a major performance consideration when offering services over the Internet.

Session
The active connection of two computers or one or more users to a computer. It is also one of the 7 layers in the OSI model.

SOAP
The Soap protocol specification defines a uniform way of passing XML-encoded data. Using HTTP (or SMTP, FTP) as the underlying communication protocol it also defines a way to perform Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). SOAP came about  from the realisation that no matter how clever the current middleware offerings are, like DCOM or CORBA,  they need a WAN wrapper.  In terms of ensuring interoperability, sending messages as plain XML makes sense. The middleware developers appear willing to put up with the inconvenience of parsing and serializing XML in order to scale up to wider networks.

Suite
A set of applications designed to operate together.

UDDI
Universal Discovery Description and Integration is the yellow pages of Web services.  As with traditional yellow pages, we can search for a company that offers the services we need, read about the service offered and contact someone for more information. As already mentioned above, we can offer a Web service without registering it in UDDI,  although that would be like relying on word-of-mouth advertising.  If we want to reach a significant market, we need UDDI so our customers can find us. A UDDI directory entry is an XML file that describes a business and the services it offers.

Web Service
A self-contained, self-describing, modular Application that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web.  Web services perform functions that can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes.

World Wide Web (www)
The term used to describe the Internet as made up of a global number of sites that users may access from anywhere in the world, thus implementing the "village" concept.

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.

XML
XML, Extensible Markup Language, is a simplified (but strict) subset of SGML that maintains the SGML features of validation, structure, and extensibility. XML is a standardized text format designed specifically for transmitting structured data to Web applications. XML documents are composed of entities, which are storage units containing text and/or binary data. Text is composed of character streams that form both the document character data and the document markup. Markup describes the document's storage layout and logical structure.