Introduction to Web Services

Web Services enable your applications to become web applications.

Web Services are published, found, and used through the web.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, you should have a basic understanding of the following:

• HTML
• XML

If you wish to learn these topics first, please visit our homepage for these tutorials.

What are Web Services?

• Web Services are application components
• Web Services use open protocols for communication
• 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 foundation of Web Services

How does it work?

The basic Web Services platform is XML + HTTP.

The HTTP protocol is the most commonly used internet protocol.

XML provides a language that can be used between different platforms and programming languages.

Elements of the Web services platform:

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
• UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)
• WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

We will cover these topics in later sections of this tutorial.