What are Web Services?
Gartner Group defines Web services as: “Loosely coupled software components that interact with one another dynamically via standard Internet technologies.” Forrester Research defines Web services more abstractly as: “Automated connections between people, systems, and applications that expose elements of business functionality as a software service and create new business value.” Simply put, Web services are software components that interact with one another dynamically using standard Internet technologies – thus making it possible to build bridges between systems that would otherwise require extensive programming and conversion efforts. At the more basic level, a Web service is a collection of functions that are packaged as a single unit and exposed, or made available, over a network for use by other software programs. Web services represent the formalization and standardization of the many existing Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocols that are either proprietary, poorly supported, or
top) The universal acceptance of two key standards — TCP/IP and XML — has created the technical foundation to enable companies to share information and deeply integrate business processes. Building upon these two standards, extensive industry effort has been initiated to develop a framework for interoperability between disparate business processes. This framework is known as Web services. Web services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located and invoked over the Internet. They perform well-defined functions both for applications and other Web services. These functions can be anything from simple calculations to complicated business processes. Through their loose-coupling and dynamic real-time discovery and binding, Web Services insulate applications from the complexity and details of other components, creating systems that are more flexible and adaptable. Security is recognized as a major impediment to wide-spread adoption of Web services.
Web Services are a (or the) new object-oriented technology based on SOAP XML/Schemas for distributed application computing. Its goal is to provide dynamic distributed computing independent of platform or programming language. CORBA has been only partially successful at this task. Web Services are based on internet/Web standards (http (default transport), SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and are available to all systems that can access the Web. J2EE and .net support Web Services and .net uses Web Services as the primary distributed application protocol. A single class makes up a Web Service and it’s methods are available as remote operations. The class can be written in any language and is automatically deployed as a Web Service accessible to any client. Parameters are serialized into SOAP XML and deserialized at the other end transparently to both client and service. Primitive types, classes, inheritance, enumerations and arrays are supported, see jax-rpc for the Java specification. XML Schemas descr
Related Questions
- What emerging standards are being published around Web Services and Service Registries? What are the emerging standards and classification systems?
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