1.1. What Are Web Services?

At this point, you might be wondering exactly what Web services are and, more importantly, why your enterprise should consider making some of its own functionality available as a Web service. There are numerous definitions given for Web services, ranging from the highly technical ones to simplistic. For example, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) organization, which establishes the standards for Web services, defines them as follows: “A Web service is a software system identified by a URI whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, ...

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