The Purpose of This Chapter

"Web Services" is a misnomer. One could suppose the term was created in the hype-heavy days of the 1990s, or perhaps it's a remnant from the dot-com heyday. The term Web Services is a misnomer because Web Services do not have anything in particular to do with a browser, or an end client in specific Web Services are used to provide structure to an inherently unstructured world. Web Services do use the HTTP protocol, but they are not limited to that protocol and could be used in an email or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) context. Web Services are useful when you are solving complex problems that involve computer-to-computer communications.

Web Services are ways for two different computers to exchange information across a network. Physically, the two computers could be the same computer because Web Services use an abstraction to create two computers virtually but generally a network is involved. The network could be a Local Area Network (LAN) or a Wide Area Network (WAN). The task of this chapter is to explain Web Services, the underlying protocols, how they are constructed , and why we use them.