What is a Web Service ?

Web Services are business logic components which provide functionality via the Internet

using standard protocols such as HTTP.

Web Services uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in order to expose the business

functionality.SOAP defines a standardized format in XML which can be exchanged

between two entities over standard protocols such as HTTP. SOAP is platform independent

so the consumer of a Web Service is therefore completely shielded from any

implementation details about the platform exposing the Web Service. For the consumer it

is simply a black box of send and receive XML over HTTP. So any web service hosted on

windows can also be consumed by UNIX and LINUX platform.