A Coherent Story on Web Services & Related Abbreviations
Some time ago, I decided to go over some key technologies that exist in the digital learning field. Being a part of the wider ecosystem, working mainly with the information management part, I felt that it would be nice to structure some background knowledge on the tools and software used within the digital learning domain.
During my search and my effort to document the technologies (see previous posts, post1, post2, post3), I decided to make this a bit more generic and take a look at the web services and some of the things that surround them, in a domain-agnostic manner (as much as possible at least). These things are all around us, no matter the domain in which we apply them, so I decided to create another blog post, of a more generic nature that may also be useful to someone out there. Note to readers: This is by no means a technically-sound piece, but more of a collection of the author, based on an extended web search. So, proceed at your own risk!
To begin our story, we start with the basic OSI Conceptual Model that describes seven layers of the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system. This is (maybe) too technical of a discussion, but offering an overview and some examples of each layer, will allow us to identify the part of this that concerns us. I will ignore the Physical and Data Link layers and go into the Network layer just to note that this include the IPv4 and IPv6 that you may have heard of. These are the protocols that provide an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. Then, on the Transport layer, you have TCP that provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between applications running on hosts communicating over an IP network. Then, on the Session layer, you have (among others) HTTP that is an application protocol used to transfer data over TCP/IP.
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