What are Web Services?

Web Services usage is predicted to increase rapidly in the next few years through a combination of grassroots services work and top-down IT initiatives such as enterprise SOA development. With all this excitement and investment, business-line managers may be prompted to ask themselves the question, "What are Web services?"

Web Services are a new set of standards and technologies that are making a very significant impact on IT organizations. There are many definitions of Web Services. Web Services are often described as the set of standards used to provide cross-platform, language independent application communication.

Web services is based on XML standards and is often described as consisting of three main basic standards: SOAP (simple object access protocol), WSDL (web services description language), UDDI (universal description, discovery integration). SOAP, WSDL and UDDI are standards for connecting nearly any type of application. There are many supplemental standards that are in various stages of adoption such as WS-security, SAML, XKMS etc. Many of these are in flux with further iterations being developed.

Web Services operate at the application layer in the OSI stack and are designed to tunnel through port 80 and port 443. Nearly every software vendor has announced support for Web Services standards, including packaged application vendors such as SAP, Peoplesoft, etc., database vendors like Oracle, Sybase and desktop application vendors such as Microsoft. Even legacy mainframe systems have Web Services adapters.

What are Web services? Web Services operate at the application layer in the OSI stack.

Web Services are being used for many different types of applications such as for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), B2B integration and for SOA initiatives. Web Services are being used for small project-level activities to major enterprise-wide architectural changes.

To summarize, the level of usage of Web Services has been increasing quickly because it is an easy-to-use technology, with a robust set of tools and standards for rapid project results.

For More Information

Learn more about what Web services are all about. Read the free white paper, Getting Started with Web Services