Web Services: Principles and Technology

The Internet-based economy is shifting attention from the hype of portals and Website traffic and is gearing towards the world of fully automated, complex electronic trans-actions. We have embarked on a new paradigm of Web computing: Web services. Web services have emerged as the next generation of Web-based technology for exchanging information over the Internet and, as part of the service-oriented computing paradigm, promise to revolutionize the process of developing and deploying distributed software applications.
Web services hold the promise of moving beyond the simple exchange of information – the dominating mechanism for application integration today – to the concept of access-ing, programming, and integrating application services that are encapsulated within old and new applications. An important economic benefit of the Web services computing paradigm is that it enables application developers to dynamically grow application port- folios more quickly than ever before, by creating compound application solutions that use internally existing organizational software assets (possibly based on legacy systems) which they appropriately combine with external components possibly residing in remote networks. This represents a fundamental change to the socio-economic fabric of the soft-ware developer community that improves the effectiveness and productivity in software development activities and enables enterprises to bring new products and services to the market more rapidly.