What is Web Services?

A Web service is an application that exists in a distributed environment, such as the Internet. A Web service accepts a request, performs its function based on the request, and returns a response. The request and the response can be part of the same operation, or they can occur separately, in which case the consumer does not need to wait for a response. Both the request and the response usually take the form of XML, a portable data-interchange format, and are delivered over a wire protocol, such as HTTP.

Web service transactions are usually conducted between businesses. A business that is a provider of one service can also be a consumer of another service. A Web service consumer can also be a client device, such as a thin client connecting to the Web service provider over a lightweight protocol.

Web services depend on the ability of parties to communicate with each other even if they are using different information systems. XML (Extensible Markup Language), a markup language that makes data portable, is a key technology in addressing this need. Enterprises have discovered the benefits of using XML for the integration of data both internally for sharing legacy data among departments and externally for sharing data with other enterprises. As a result, XML is increasingly being used for enterprise integration applications, both in tightly coupled and loosely coupled systems. Because of this data integration ability, XML has become the underpinning for Web-related computing.

What is XML?
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