Introduction to Web Services

This is an introductory tutorial about the fundamental elements of Web services.

What are Web Services?
Web services
 * are application components
 * communicate using open protocols
 * are self-contained and self-describing
 * can be discovered using UDDI
 * can be used by other applications
 * based on XML

According to the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, two major classes of Web services exist:
 * REST-compliant Web services: the primary purpose of this kind of Web service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of "stateless" operations
 * Arbitrary Web services: these Web services may expose an arbitrary set of operations.

How Does it Work?
The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP.

The HTTP protocol is the most used Internet protocol.

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

Platform elements
Web services platform elements are


 * SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
 * SOAP is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks.


 * UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)
 * UDDI is a platform-independent, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet and a mechanism to register and locate web service applications.


 * WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
 * WSDL is an XML-based language that provides a model for describing Web services.

We will explain these topics later in the tutorial. Thank you