Web Services

A web service is a piece of software that makes itself available for everyone over
the internet and uses the standardized XML messaging system. This means, this
piece of software will use xml for all its communications with other systems. This
means, a web browser can request for a web service by sending an xml request and
can wait for the xml response. This enables free communication between different
types of applications. For example, using web services, a java application can speak
to a perl application, a window application can speak to a unix application and so
on. Since this piece of software is using xml as its communication medium, there is
no need to depend on the underlying operating system or any particular language.
Web services are self contained, modular, distributed and dynamic applications that
can be described, published, located and invoked over the network to create
products, processes, and supply chains. These applications can be local, distributed
or web based. Web services are built on top of open standards such as TCP/IP, Java,
HTML and XML.
Web services are xml based information exchange systems that uses internet for
direct application to application interaction. These systems can include programs,
objects, messages or documents.
A web service is a collection of open protocols and standards used for exchanging
data between applications or systems. Software applications written in various
programming languages and running on various platforms can use web services to
exchange data over computer networks like the internet in a manner similar to
inter-process communication in a single computer. This interoperability ex between
java and python, windows and linux applications is due to use of open standards.

To summarize
A web service is available over the internet or private networks.
A web service uses a standardized xml messaging system.
A web service is not tied to any operating system or programming language
A web service is self described using a standard xml grammar
A web service is discoverable via a simple find mechanism

A web service comprises of the following components.

The basic web service platform is a combination of XML and http. Ie web service =
XML + HTTP.
All the standard web services work based on the following components
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
WSDL (Web services Description Languages)

How web services work

You can build a java based web service application on solaris that is accessible from
your visual basic application that runs on windows. You can also use C# to build a
new web service on windows that can be invoked from your web application that is
based on JSP and runs on Linux.
An example:
Consider a simple account management and order processing system. The
accounting personal uses a client application built with visual basic or JSP to create
new accounts and enter new customer orders.
The processing logic for this system is written in java and resides on a solaris
machine, which also interacts with the database to store the information.
The steps illustrated above are as follows.
1. The client program bundles the account registration information into a SOAP
message.
2. This SOAP message is sent to the web service as the body of an HTTP Post
request.
3. The web service unpacks the SOAP request which is retrieved from the HTTP
Post request and converts it into a command that the application can
understand. The application processes the information as required and
responds with a new unique account number for that customer.
4. Next, the web service packages the response into another SOAP message,
which it sends back to the client program in response to its HTTP Request.
5. The client program unpacks the SOAP message to obtain the results of the
account registration process. For further details about the implementation of
the web services technology, read about the cape clear product set and
review the product components.