InfoCenter Home > 4.8: Web services - an overviewWeb services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located, and invoked over a network. Web services could be weather reports or stock quotes. Transaction Web services, supporting business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-client (B2C) operations, could be airline reservations or purchase orders. Web services reflect a new "service-oriented" approach to programming, based on the idea of building applications by discovering and implementing network-available services, or by invoking available applications to accomplish some task. This "service-oriented" approach is independent of specific programming languages or operating systems. Instead, Web services rely on pre-existing transport technologies (such as HTTP) and standard data encoding techniques (such as XML) for their implementation. The Web services architecture describes three roles: Web services components provide three basic operations:In order for some component to become a Web service, it must be:
With Web services, programming complexity is reduced because application designers do not have to worry about implementing the services they are invoking. Interactions in Web services are bound dynamically at runtime. A service requester describes the features of the required service and uses the service broker to find an appropriate service. WebSphere Application Server supports making the following artifacts into Web services:
See article Web services components for a description of the key components that comprise a Web service. Visit URL, www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/webservicestoolkit, to access the Web services toolkit on Alphaworks. This site provides tools for creating WSDL files and SOAP clients, and describes working examples. Learn more about Web services. Register for the Web services tutorial on Alphaworks. |
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