Web service, Austin, Texas, Broadband
Austin
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 15th-largest in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in the nation from 2000 to 2006. According to the 2009 U.S. Census estimate, Austin had a population of 757,688. The city is the cultural and economic center of the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Area, with a population of approximately 1,652,602 as of the July 2008 U.S. Census estimate, making it the 36th-largest metropolitan area in the nation.
Web Services
Web services are typically application programming interfaces (API) or web APIs that are accessed via Hypertext Transfer Protocol and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services. Web services tend to fall into one of two camps: Big Web Services and RESTful Web Services.
"Big Web Services" use Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages that follow the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and have been popular with traditional enterprise. In such systems, there is often a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). The latter is not a requirement of a SOAP endpoint, but it is a prerequisite for automated client-side code generation in many Java and .NET SOAP frameworks (frameworks such as Spring, Apache Axis2 and Apache CXF being notable exceptions). Some industry organizations, such as the WS-I, mandate both SOAP and WSDL in their definition of a web service.
Web services in a service-oriented architecture.
Web API is a development in web services (in a movement called Web 2.0) where emphasis has been moving away from SOAP based services towards Representational State Transfer (REST) based communications. REST services do not require XML, SOAP, or WSDL service-API definitions.
Broadband
Broadband in telecommunications refers to a signaling method that includes or handles a relatively wide range (or band) of frequencies, which may be divided into channels or frequency bins. Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context. The wider the bandwidth, the greater the information-carrying capacity. In radio, for example, a very narrow-band signal will carry Morse code; a broader band will carry speech; a still broader band is required to carry music without losing the high audio frequencies required for realistic sound reproduction. A television antenna described as "broadband" may be capable of receiving a wide range of channels; while a single-frequency or Lo-VHF antenna is "narrowband" since it only receives 1 to 5 channels. In data communications a digital modem will transmit a datarate of 56 kilobits per seconds (kbit/s) over a 4 kilohertz wide telephone line (narrowband). However when that same line is converted to a standard twisted-pair wire (no telephone filters), it becomes hundreds of kilohertz wide (broadband) and can carry several megabits per second (ADSL).