The Importance of Web Services - an Overview

The importance of web services – an overview

Definition

A Web service is defined by the W3C as "a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network." Web services are frequently just Web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services (source: Wikipedia)

• Web services are application components

• Web services communicate using open protocols

• Web services are self-contained and self-describing

• Web services can be discovered using UDDI

• Web services can be used by other applications

• XML is the basis for Web services

Web Services have three basic platform elements: These are called SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

We will explain these topics later in the tutorial

The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP.

The HTTP protocol is the most used Internet protocol.

XML provides a language which can be used between different platforms and programming languages and still express complex messages and functions.

A few years ago Web services were not fast enough