Web Services

Web Services offer a framework for heterogeneous systems to interoperate and introduce industry standards for the discovery, communication, security and reliability of distributed services.

• UDDI is the standard for Web Service discovery. WSDL is used to describe the Web Services themselves and it is this definition that is published in UDDI.

• SOAP is the de-facto message standard for Web Service communication.

• XML is the standard for representing structured data (documents).

• WS-Security is the standard for defining interoperable security contexts for SOAP messages.

• BTP, WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction are examples of upcoming transaction protocol standards for use with loosely coupled applications.

• WS-BPEL is an upcoming standard for defining process flows.

There is a lot of hype about Web Services and although it offers a lingua franca for distributed applications communication, it is nothing really that new in terms of IT architecture.

The most important new challenge facing orgainzations is the industry trend toward Service Oriented Architectures, and it is in this environment that the adoption of Web Services by technology vendors offers more flexibility and choice for IT departments.