Section 3.2. Transport Services

3.2. Transport Services

Web services is basically an interoperable messaging architecture, and message transport technologies form the foundation of this architecture. Web services is inherently transport neutral. Although you can transport Web services messages by using the ubiquitous Web protocols such as HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) or Secure HTTP (HTTPS) to give the widest possible coverage in terms of support for the protocols (see Chapter 2), you can also transport them over any communications protocol, using proprietary ones if appropriate. Although transport protocols are fundamental to Web services and clearly are a defining factor in the scope of interoperability, the details are generally hidden from the design of Web services. A detailed discussion of these is not included in the scope of this book.