Steve White wrote:
A user asked me, what are Web Services?
A web service is a procedure which can be invoked remotely using a set
of communication protocols prescribed by W3C. If you are familiar with
the RPC concept, web services are easily explained as one possible
implementation of this general concept.
A Web Service is a program that processes SOAP messages coming through a
network.
Yes, pretty much so.
In operation, it generates a proxy program that manages
communications on behalf of a client application.
Not necessarily. Also, I don't understand what you mean by "in
operation". A "web service" itself doesn't generate a proxy; a
programmer might choose to do so when implementing the web service's
client. However, the exact way how a client produces the required
messages is irrelevant to the definition of the term "web service". You
can invoke web services without first statically generating stub code
from WSDL. Indeed, you can invoke a web service without any WSDL, if you
know its location and signature.
The standardized Web Services include
WS-Security
WS-Addressing
WS-Notification
WS-Reliability
WS-Transaction
These standards just describe the calling conventions and communication
protocols. But they don't specify any standardized web services and
certainly cannot be said to *be* web services themselves.
Best regards,
Jan Ploski
