FAQs - Questions about Web Services

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What is a Web Service?
A Web Service is a new type of XML based Web application. This new type of application is published, located, and invoked across the Web as a service. A Web Service can be anything from a simple request to a complicated business process. XML and SOAP are the crucial technologies that enable Web Services.

Why XML?
XML is a mark-up language for documents containing structured information. Structured information contains content (words, diagrams, etc.) and an indication of what the content means. Because XML is a text format for holding data there are no proprietary issues as all computer systems can read and write text files making XML compatible across systems. XML is an excellent technology for transporting structured data across the Web and allowing Web services to manipulate data in a reliable, automated way.

What is SOAP?
The SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol specification defines a uniform way of passing XML-encoded data. Using HTTP (or SMTP, FTP) as the underlying communication protocol it also defines a way for invoking methods on servers, services, components and objects. SOAP is an application-level protocol so it can work directly over a transport protocol such as TCP. By using HTTP and XML, SOAP allows communications between applications running on any platform and connected over the existing Internet infrastructure.

Why Web Services?
Web Services came about from the realisation that as the Web becomes more ubiquitous across businesses and organisations it becomes increasingly important to find some way for different systems to talk to each other over the Internet. In spite of previous efforts through component based technologies like DCOM and CORBA there remained platform interoperability issues. Because they are XML based a Web service does not require that users run a traditional browser on some version of Windows. Web services serve all sorts of devices, platforms, and browser types, delivering content over a wide variety of connection types.

How would I use Web Services?
Web services are used in several ways and are used across the Internet, a corporate extranet or intranet. When used across the Internet a company publishes its service on its website and on the UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description and Integration - a type of Web services yellow pages) or incorporates a published service into its environment. Web services can be used in the intranet corporate environment to link applications and legacy systems allowing information to seamlessly flow to the requesting client via any XML supporting output device (such as the browser).