Hal 1-5

What Web Services Are

Web services is a technology that incorporates existing standards and introduces a
new suite of specifications and APIs for communicating between application
components across the Internet. Web services provide a standardized mechanism for
remotely accessing data and application functionality.

Web services are built on loose coupling between the application publishing the
services and the application using those services. Loose coupling means that the
client of a service is essentially independent of the service. The way a client
(which can be another service) communicates with the service does not depend on the
implementation of the service. Web services employ an interface that abstracts the
implementation of the Web service, so changing the implementation of an interface
does not affect the implementation of consumers. Comparing to the point-to-point
integrated system, which requires changes made at one end to be propagated to the
other end, Web services are much more flexible.

Larger software systems are broken down into smaller modular and self-contained
componentsshared servicesthat can be discovered and used by other applications
and other
Web services.
Web services use an XML-based description language to describe themselves.

Hal 1-6
What Web Services Are (continued)
Web services provide a distributed computing technology using standard XML
protocols and
formats. Because a Web service uses standard protocols for communication and data
transfer, it
is platform and implementation independent. You interact with a Web service in a
standard way,
independently of the technologysuch as the underlying protocols, component models,
programming language, or operating systemused to implement the service.

Hal 1-9
The Building Blocks of Web Services
Web services eliminate the interoperability issues of existing solutions, such as
CORBA and
DCOM, by leveraging open Internet standards. XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI are used in
concert to provide Web service applications.
XML documents contain the information being exchanged between two parties.
SOAP (to communicate) defines an XML-based structure for passing information,
such as
messages and data, between Web services and applications.
WSDL (to describe) is an XML-based standard for describing the external interface
to a
Web service.
UDDI (to advertise and syndicate) allows organizations to register their Web
services in a
uniform manner within a directory, so clients can locate their Web services and
learn how
to access them.