Anatomy of a Web service

One of the newest innovations for the use of the Internet is Web services. Web services allow applications and Internet-enabled devices to easily communicate with one another and combine their functionality to provide services to each other, independent of platform or language. Web services are characterized by SOAP messages used to talk to a Web service, WSDL files that describe a Web service, and the UDDI used to find Web services. Conceptually, Web services are very understandable. They eliminate many of the complexities that have been required when there is a need for computer applications to interact with each other. The question then becomes, is the development of Web services substantially less complex than the prior options available for creating interoperable components? That question is assessed in this paper through the development and annotation of a basic Web service. Software applications like Visual Studio .NET have greatly simplified the creation of Web service and consequently Web services are the future.