Chapter 1: Presenting Web Services

Overview

It is a significant gesture when the entire computer industry agrees on a new technology. Such is the case with Web Services. Leading industry players such as IBM, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun support Web Services, not only in marketing terms but also by releasing Web Services products. In addition, many existing products are incorporating Web Services functionality into their feature sets. All this activity means that there is now a plethora of Web Services platforms and Web Services development tools available. A cynic might point out that all that is missing are the actual Web Services themselves! These services are appearing, however. Web Services look set to dominate the deployment of new application solutions over the next few years.

Many aspects of Web Services present challenges for security. These challenges are being addressed by the initiatives that are presented in this book—initiatives such as WS-Security, SAML, and XKMS. This chapter introduces Web Services. Web Services depend on XML, so an overview of XML is provided. This includes XML Schema, which is important to know since many of the Web Services security specifications include XML Schema definitions.

Readers who are already familiar with Web Services may wish to skip over this chapter. But beware if you have a hazy notion of Web Services. The first trap for the newcomer who wishes to understand Web Services is the name “Web Services” itself. To take the approach of looking at the name “Web Services” and guessing, not unreasonably, that it must refer to “services on the Web” is a mistake. The fact is that both the “Web” and the “Services” words in the term “Web Services” are misleading. Let’s examine why.