Introduction to Web Services

This is an introductory tutorial about the fundamental elements of Web services.

## What are Web Services?

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Web services

* are application components
* communicate using open protocols
* are self-contained and self-describing
* can be discovered using UDDI
* can be used by other applications
* based on XML

According to the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, two major classes of Web services exist:

* REST-compliant Web services: the primary purpose of this kind of Web service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of "stateless" operations
* Arbitrary Web services: these Web services may expose an arbitrary set of operations.[1]

## How Does it Work?

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The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP.

The HTTP protocol is the most used Internet protocol.

XML provides a language that can be used between different platforms and programming languages and still expresses complex messages and functions.

## Platform elements

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Web services platform elements are

* SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

SOAP is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks.

* UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)

UDDI is a platform-independent, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based registry for businesses worldwide to list themselves on the Internet and a mechanism to register and locate web service applications.

* WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

WSDL is an XML-based language that provides a model for describing Web services.

We will explain these topics later in the tutorial. Thank you

## See Also

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* Internet Fundamentals

## References

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1. ↑ "Relationship to the World Wide Web and REST Architectures". Web Services Architecture. W3C. Retrieved 2011-04-22.