Introduction

Since the advent of software, advancements in software technology have occurred in leaps and bounds. This advancement has also created systems that, although providing excellent business functionality, are disconnected and cut off from other application systems.

With further advancement and growth in companies comes the requirement to upgrade existing software infrastructure. However, it is not possible to toss out the existing software because a large amount of money has been invested. Existing software also has been refined to fit companies' specific requirements over the years. Displacing such systems would mean losing a lot of company investments and business-related functionalities.

To further complicate the issue, as security hazards grew more numerous, it became more and more evident that companies had to guard their networks. To enable this, firewalls came into the picture. This started to pose problems for applications, which were legally allowed to access only a few components across the firewall, but needed to access many more.

The need arose to connect the new technologies with existing legacy systems and Web-based components and to do this with ease across firewalls. This gave birth to the concept of Web Services.

As the term Web Services implies, these are services offered to various Web-based components in the architecture of a business system. These services work toward developing a loosely coupled world of Web applications, using standard Web protocols for communication and transportation of information across these loosely coupled applications.

Now it is obvious that these problems were foreseen by the software industry and that this is not the first time such services have been designed. So what were such earlier services? They are very familiar-sounding services, such as RMI, CORBA, and COM. However, the problem that these services faced was that there were no specifications for standardization across vendors; these services were all vendor specific. The solution to the problem started to become a problem.