The universal acceptance of two key standards - TCP/IP and XML - has created the technical foundation to enable companies to share information and deeply integrate business processes. Building upon these two standards, extensive industry effort has been initiated to develop a framework for interoperability between disparate business processes. This framework is known as Web services.
Web services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located and invoked over the Internet. They perform well-defined functions both for applications and other Web services. These functions can be anything from simple calculations to complicated business processes. Through their loose-coupling and dynamic real-time discovery and binding, Web Services insulate applications from the complexity and details of other components, creating systems that are more flexible and adaptable. Security is recognized as a major impediment to wide-spread adoption of Web services.
