Can someone explain to me mySAP, SAP NetWeaver, and Web Services/XML?

[fuzzybabybunny]

Ok, so the mySAP Business Suite + NetWeaver allow great integration, communication, and expandability of SAP's products. ex. ERP can work easily with SCM, if you don't have a CRM module it can easily be added on, if you already have a CRM module you can easily add functionality to it,

SAP NetWeaver integrates these integration tools and provides a standard platform for new applications to be developed on.

Web Services and XML are great.

All vendors and brands have web services, and XML and HTTP allow easy use of these web services between different vendors. ex. Microsoft can use a web service on a Linux box.

Here is where I'm a little confused:

What would be an example of a web service? I'm thinking like password authentication? Sooo.... Windows box receives a password that it needs to authenticate. It translates this into XML, which is sent via HTTP to a Linux box. The Linux box can read the XML and uses its Password Authentication web service to authenticate the password. Then it sends back either a valid or invalid via XML/HTTP to the Windows box?

Is Service Oriented Architecture kind of like Object Oriented Programming? If you need something done, like a certain process, you simply "call" a pre-defined service from somewhere else?

 

[Markbnj]

A web service is just an http handler (daemon, isapi, cgi, servlet, etc.) that accepts a (possibly parameterized) http request for a piece of information, and returns that information as a structured XML document or fragment. This is in contrast to the ordinary http handler we're all familiar with that always returns a complete HTML document. The idea is simply that you can compose XML information into the document on the client far more granularly and flexibly than you can work with entire HTML pages.

An example of a web service in an organization can be anything that meets these requirements: a service that takes a range of times and returns a list of unoccupied conference rooms; a service that takes no parameters and returns a list of authentication servers; etc.