Development and Deployment of Web Services

Abstract

A Web service is an interface that describes a collection of operations that are network accessible through standardized XML (extensible markup language) messaging specifications such as SOAP, WSDL (Web service description language), and UDDI to provide open, XML-based mechanisms for application interoperability, service description, and service discovery (Kim & Jain, 2005). They are self-contained, modular units of application logic that provide business functionality to other applications via an Internet connection (Srivastava & Koehler, 2003). Although Web services are a relatively new concept, they provide a solution to the set of serious problems that have plagued enterprise systems using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Web services address a similar set of problems that middleware technologies such as CORBA, RPC, COM, and RMI address by providing a tightly coupled and vendor-driven proprietary environment for implementing SOA.