Introduction to Web Services

What are web services?

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

Though established, distributed object protocols like CORBA-IIOP, DCOM and 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 for network communication to enable network communication.