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Top1. Introduction
Web Service paradigm (WSP) offers a set of standards and technologies that an organization can interact with different networks securely. It is a service intended to operate within machines to exchange Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages over diverse networks (Catalina et al, 2005). Web Service (WS) is a software component comprised of specific business methods that is published, described and invoked over diverse networks using Extensible Mark Up Language (XML) based open standards (Siew et al, 2006). WS is a computing technology that offers interaction and interchange of resources among e-service community and clients (Oladosu et al, 2005). WS normally complies with four standards, such as: (a) XML, the messages are sent over network in an XML format, (b) SOAP, an standard protocol to specify how XML documents are exchanged over Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Message Oriented Middleware (MOM), (c) Web Service Description Language (WSDL), offers a metadata description of request and response parameters for interfacing, and (d) Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI), the directory where services are registered.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a technology for implementing, configuring and deploying distributed Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications using a set of classes placed at the top of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The existing different distributed technologies like ASMX WS, .NET Framework remoting, Microsoft Enterprise Services and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) are unified in one umbrella of WCF. Client can access loosely coupled services through the use of WSDL irrespective of platform from which the service is hosted. WCF supports many advanced WS-Security specifications as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Automatic Transaction, WS-Secure Conversation, WS-Trust etc. WCF .NET facilitates the development of distributed and interconnected applications based on SOA (Markus & Bernd, 2010). WCF has been designed to provide manageable approach to distributed computing, interoperability and service orientation in varied systems maintaining security and reliability of services (Mistry & Khanna, 2011). The WCF service has composed of three components to a simple job of message communication with a client in SOA model, they are: (i) Service Class that implements service as a set of methods, (ii) Host Environment, the service can be hosted in Console Application, Windows Service, Windows Forms Application or in IIS, and (iii) Endpoints, the messages are communicated via service and client endpoints. WCF is a unified technique for design and developing SOA architecture (Mostafa et al, 2012). WCF interacts with other systems using SOAP messages as defined in WSDL, exchanges message using HTTP or HTTPS protocols in XML format, service registry based on UDDI standard is used to publish and discover WCF services (Ahmad, 2014).