Latest Technologies: Simple Object Access Protocol

India Latest Technology - NANO

The much awaited Tata small car, which is giving sleepless nights to its rivals, was finally unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008. The small car, which is priced at Rs100, 000 (2,500 dollars), has been named Nano. According to the Tata Motors, the Nano will hit the Indian roads later this year. Ever since the Tatas announced their intention of developing the 1 lakh car (touted as people’s car), the auto industry experts have been raising doubts over the price, features, safety and specifications of Tata Nano. Have a look at specifications and other aspects of the Tata Nano, the four door mini-hatchback.

Looks & Dimensions of Nano: Keeping in mind the young age group, the Tata Motors has strived well to give the Nano a contemporary and stylish look. The snub-nosed small car derives inspiration from Fiat 500 and Nissan Micra. As far as dimensions of the car are concerned, Nano is 3.1 metres (10.23 feet) long, 1.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres high and can accommodate four to five people.

Engine: The small car sports a two cylinder 623 cc, 33 horsepower rear mounted multi-point fuel injection (MPFi) petrol engine. Tata claims that the car can touch the top speed of 105 kms.

Fuel Efficiency: Engineers at Tata Motors have designed an efficient engine that can run 20 Kms on every litre of petrol.

Pollution: Against the criticism and concerns of the environmentalists, Nano surpasses Indian regulatory requirements and Euro IV emission norms. In fact, Tata claims that the small car is less polluting than most of the bikes on Indian roads.

Safety: Tata says that they have tested the small car extensively for front, rear and side collisions and come out with a product that exceeds current regulatory requirements. The safety features of the Nano include a strong passenger compartment, intrusion resistant doors, seat belts, sturdy seats and anchorage.
Price: The base model of the car will sport a price tag of Rs 100,000 (2,500 dollars) which excludes taxes and transport costs. The high end/deluxe models will include air-conditioning and other features to be incorporated based on suggestions of the common people

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Simple Object Access Protocol - SOAP

A group of vendors from Microsoft, IBM, Lotus and others, created an XML-based protocol that lets you activate applications or objects within an application across the Internet. In a nutshell, SOAP codifies the practice of using XML and HTTP to invoke methods across networks and computer platforms.
What does this really mean?
With distributed computing and Web applications, a request for an application comes from one computer (the "client") and is transmitted over the Internet to another computer (the "server"). There are many ways of doing this, but SOAP makes it easy by using XML and HTTP - which are already standard Web formats.
Web Applications
Web applications are where SOAP really comes into its own. When you view a Web page you are using a Web browser to query a Web server and view a Web page. With SOAP, you would use your computer client application to query a server and actually run a program.
For Example
Right now, you might use online banking to access your bank accounts. My bank has the following options:
Online banking - account reviews, transfers, stop payment, etc.
Online bill paying
Online credit card management
While this bank has these three applications, they are all mostly separate. So if I go into the banking section I can't transfer funds from my savings account to my credit card, and I can't view my account balances while I'm in the online bill paying section.
One of the reasons that these three functions are separated is because they reside on different machines. I.e. the program that runs the online bill paying is one computer server, while the credit card and bill paying applications are on other servers. With SOAP, this doesn't matter.
You might have a method that gets an account balance: getAccount.
With standard Web based applications, that method is only available to the programs that call it and are on the same server. Using SOAP, you can access that method across the Internet via HTTP and XML.

How is SOAP Used?
There are many possible applications for SOAP, here are just a couple:
Business to Business integration - SOAP allows businesses to develop their applications, and then make those applications available to other companies
Distributed applications - programs like databases could be stored on one server and accessed and managed by clients across the Internet
One thing to consider when looking into implementing SOAP on your business server is that there are many other ways to do the same thing that SOAP does. But the number one benefit you'll gain from using SOAP is its simplicity. SOAP is just XML and HTTP combined to send and receive messages over the Internet. It is not constrained by the application language (Java, C#, Perl) or the platform (Windows, UNIX, Mac), and this makes it much more versatile than other solutions