web sevices

Web Services
If you ask a developer what Web services are, you'll hear something like, "self-describing software modules, semantically encapsulating discrete functionality, wrapped in and accessible via standard Internet communication protocols like XML and SOAP."
But if you ask a business leader who has implemented Web service-based solutions, you'll get a different kind of answer. You'll hear that Web services are an approach that helps the business connect with its customers, partners, and employees. They enable the business to extend existing services to new customers. They help the business work more efficiently with its partners and suppliers. They unlock information so it can flow to every employee who needs it. They reduce development time and expense for new projects. You'll hear less about what Web services are and more about what they enable the business to do.
Benefits of Web Services
By enabling applications to share data across different hardware platforms and operating systems, Web services provide many benefits, including:
• Opening the door to new business opportunities by making it easy to connect with partners.
• Delivering dramatically more personal, integrated experiences to users through the new breed of smart devices—including PCs.
• Saving time and money by cutting development time.
• Increasing revenue streams by enabling businesses to easily make their own Web services available to others.
Connecting Applications Through Web Services
Web services are revolutionizing how applications talk to other applications—or, more broadly, how computers talk to other computers—by providing a universal data format that lets data be easily adapted or transformed. Based on XML, the universal language of Internet data exchange, Web services can communicate across platforms and operating systems, regardless of the programming language in which the applications are written.
Each Web service is a discrete unit of code that handles a limited set of tasks. However, although Web services remain independent of each other, they can loosely link themselves into a collaborating group that performs a particular task.
Web Services Use Industry-Standard Protocols
Web services also make it possible for developers to choose between building all pieces of their applications, or consuming (using) Web services created by others. This means that an individual company doesn't have to supply every piece for a complete solution. The ability to expose (announce and offer) your own Web services creates new revenue streams for your company.
Web services are invoked over the Internet by means of industry-standard protocols including SOAP; XML; and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). They are defined through public standards organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
SOAP is an XML-based messaging technology standardized by the W3C, which specifies all the necessary rules for locating Web services, integrating them into applications, and communicating between them. UDDI is a public registry, offered at no cost, where one can publish and inquire about Web services.