With a sudden increase in awareness about the terms "web services", "WSDL", "XML" and "SOAP", to name a few, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of curious people who want to know what all the fuss is all about. Today's most popular search engine, Google, exposes its search application programming interface (API) through a Web service, giving Web developers the oppertunity to utilise such search capabilities within their applications. E-commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay also expose their product catalogues and search facilities via Web services. So what is the hype all about?

Web services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered by one application to other applications via the World Wide Web. Clients of these services can aggregate them to form an end-user application, enable business transactions, or create new Web services. Utilities of this kind are built according to Extensible Markup Language (XML), simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specifications. They are prevelent and portable, covering every operating system and programming language. These standards provide the foundation for application integration and aggregation that companies are starting to use in order to create solutions and improve the usefulness and ineroperability of their applications.

This is an excerpt from my article published in Spider August 2005 issue. You can read the rest of this article "Understanding the architecture and facilities of Web services" on page 57 of the magazine. Some contents of the magazine are available for online viewing.

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