Many people and companies have debated the exact definition of Web services. At a minimum, however, a Web service is any piece of software that makes itself available over the Internet and uses a standardized XML messaging system. XML is used to... Read More

Web service is the way to publish application's function on web that can be accessible to the rest of the world. Web services are the components that can be used by other applications ASP.NET offers easy way to develop web services, just... Read More

The Web service protocol stack is an evolving set of protocols used to define, discover, and implement Web services. The core protocol stack consists of four layers: Service Transport: This layer is responsible for transporting messages between... Read More

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) currently represents the service description layer within the Web service protocol stack. In a nutshell, WSDL is an XML grammar for specifying a public interface for a Web service. This public... Read More

Attaching the WebMethod attribute to a Public method indicates that you want the method exposed as part of the XML Web service. The WebMethod attribute tells .NET that a particular public method should be exposed as a web-callable method. The... Read More

SOAP is an XML-based protocol for exchanging information between computers. Although SOAP can be used in a variety of messaging systems and can be delivered via a variety of transport protocols, the main focus of SOAP is Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)... Read More

People have been using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) for some time now, and they long ago discovered how to send such calls over HTTP. So, what is really new about Web services? The answer is XML. XML lies at the core of Web services, and provides a... Read More

If you want a more intuitive feel for Web services, try out the IBM Web Services Browser, available on the IBM Alphaworks site. The browser provides a series of Web services demonstrations. Behind the scenes, it ties together SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to... Read More

XML-RPC is a protocol that uses XML messages to perform Remote Procedure Calls. Requests are encoded in XML and sent via HTTP POST; XML responses are embedded in the body of the HTTP response. More succinctly, XML-RPC = HTTP + XML + Remote... Read More

The easiest way to get started with Web services is to learn XML-RPC. Check out the XML-RPC specification or read my book, Web Services Essentials. O'Reilly has also recently released a book on Programming Web Services with XML-RPC by Simon St... Read More

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is actively pursuing standardization of Web service protocols. In September 2000, the W3C established an XML Protocol Activity. The goal of the group is to establish a formal standard for SOAP. A draft version of... Read More

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) currently represents the discovery layer within the Web services protocol stack. UDDI was originally created by Microsoft, IBM, and Ariba, and represents a technical specification for... Read More

A Web service is a class that allows its methods to be called by methods on other machines via common data formats and protocols, such as XML and HTTP. In .NET, the over-the-network method calls are commonly implemented through the Simple Object... Read More

The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a platform-independent protocol that uses XML to make remote procedure calls. Each request and response is packaged in a SOAP message containing the information that a Web service requires to process the... Read More

It is possible to process user-defined types (also known as custom types) in a Web service. These types can be passed to or returned from Web methods. Web service clients also can use these user-defined types, because the proxy class created for... Read More