So What are Web Services?
There is no doubt “web services” are beginning to get people’s attention and mind space
So ..”What are Web Services?” This section provides a simple background for those new to this field and some resources to further browse.
Broadly speaking the label “web services” is applied at two levels – 1) the conceptual and business focus 2) the underlying technology or technologies.
The first, is the abstract or conceptual level where a web service can be described as a business process or function that is exposed and made available internally or externally within an organization using Internet standards and protocols. Forrester Research takes this more abstract view when describing a web services as “automated connections between people, systems and applications that expose elements of business functionality as a software service and create new business value.”
Similarly, The Stencil Group, conceptually describe web services as a “model in which discreet tasks are distributed widely throughout a value net”.
At a technology level web services can be considered as a “stack” of emerging standards that describe a service oriented, component based distributed application architecture. Typically the following standards are often referred to as core components:
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)
Web Services Flow Language (WSFL)
The Stencil Group definition is a useful starting point:
Web services are: loosely coupled re-useable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are distributed and programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols.
This definition is consistent with the Gartner Group definition of Web Services: as loosely coupled software components that interact with one another dynamically via standard Internet technologies.
In simple and tangible terms one can consider web services as building blocks for creating open distributed systems. From a technology point of view, web services is about connecting disparate software systems using standard protocols for seamless information and process flow.
From a business point of view, web services are about business – its promise is it will allow organizations to focus on what is important - the service. Hence as web services technology matures many believe the software or technology component will become an invisible element of the business transaction or service.
Definition of Web services
What are Web Services
Why Web Services
Other useful links and resources are provided in the download section of our website