Web Services

Web Services

Introduction

Web Services have been described as the next evolution in distributed computing and is considered by many to be one of the most important innovations in distributed computing in recent years. A "Web Service" does not refer to a technology or platform but describes a set of interrelated supporting technologies and architectures. At its’ most basic level a Web Service can be described as a: “a Network of applications that use SOAP, UDDI and WSDL to exchange information in the form of XML documents”. This definition, while technically correct, does not provide a full understanding of exactly what Web Services are and does not explain why they are important.
Web Services allow the components of an application to be used by another application that is physically located in another part of the world. This is accomplished via the World Wide Web using the Web’s underlying set of protocols, such as the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object...