The Author s Personal Definition of Web Services

The Author's Personal Definition of Web Services

In this author's view, after taking into consideration all of these data points, Web services are a new class of cross-platform program-to-program communications that enable loosely coupled applications to easily find each other, to easily and dynamically establish parameters that enable similar or disparate programs to work together cooperatively, and enable them to communicate in an automated, unattended fashion over the Internet.

"Web services are applications that make use of registry and communications standards to work together in a dynamic (fluid) manner (where one application provides transactional, messaging, or computational 'services' for another). These applications make use of an agreed-to format (XML or some variant of XML) for presenting information and data; and they use Web services standards for finding service applications (UDDI), negotiating how to send and receive information (WSDL), binding communications sessions (SOAP), and then transferring that information over the Internet (HTTP)."