Key Concepts in IT: Client Facilities, XML, and Security

Client Facilities

Client Facilities: Performance, ensure integrity, updates, risk confidential. Static pages, forms, active content, plugins, stand-alone applications.

XML

XML (Extensible Markup Language): Preferred form for B2B and internal documents with legal effect. Key benefits: non-proprietary, platform independent, HTTP compatibility, international support, extensible, self-defining, common tools, and transformation. Complementary techniques: UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) – web service design. Signatures have legal effect.

Components

Components: Good because turn-key systems tend to be too large and inflexible. Advantages: higher quality and design, maintenance shared, components up to date, compatible interfaces, flexibility. Disadvantages: cost, market, support, enhancements. Specifications: basic properties, interfaces, levels of granularity, composition, shared infrastructure, and development.

Security Techniques

Security Techniques: Secure physical environment, system integrity, recoverability, authentication, authorization, communication, non-repudiation, monitoring, administration.

Firewall

Firewall: Restricts communication from a network environment. IP filtering, network address translation, proxy services.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management: Have needed information, share insights, and combine skills. Human knowledge: experts' experience. Passive knowledge: recorded but must be retrieved and applied. Active knowledge: linked to models, invoked automatically.

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning: Shared vision. Nature, target markets, growth, products, personnel, competitors, key technologies. Business objectives: return on investment. Timing of investment. Business processes: improvement, transformation. Timetable for change work progress.

Testing

Testing: Model environments mimics, quality assurance. Enables to revise components to be replaced.

Interoperability

Interoperability: Capability of applications, components, and services to work together to meet requirements. Interfaces, protocols… innovation.

SOAP

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): Implementation of web services in networks. Purpose is to induce extensibility, neutrality, and independence. Uses XML information set for its message format and relies on application layer protocols. SOAP web protocols allow clients to invoke web services and receive responses in an independent language. Envelope (structure), set (data types), convention (procedure calls and responses).

WSDL

WSDL (Web Services Description Language): Used for describing the functionality of web services. The file provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, parameters, and what data structure it returns. Used to call one of the operations listed in WSDL using XML over HTTP.

UDDI

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration): Web services discovery is the process of finding suitable web services for a given task. White pages (address, contact, identifiers), yellow pages (industrial category based on standards), green pages (technical information).

Data Transformation

Data Transformation: Often used in data warehouse systems. Data mapping, code generation.