Definition - Web Services

Web Services are “network applications that use SOAP and WSDL to exchange information in the form of WSDL documents.” [5]

Though distributed object protocols like CORBA-IIOP, DCOM or RMI already exist, the concept of web services is strongly discussed. Since web services rely on standard protocols (SOAP, WSDL), they are independent of the underlying implementation. Thus, they allow for interoperability across platforms. Former technologies require proprietary protocols and/or the Java language to enable network communication.

The figure below represents the general architecture of a web service. Client and Service Provider interact via SOAP. If based on Java, the JAX-RPC is the appropriate API. The web service itself is published in the UDDI Repository. For Java publishing, the Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) provides a standard way to access business registries and share information.

Figure 1: Web Service Architecture