Introduction to Web Services

Unlike previous web-enabling approaches, Web services is a fully open standards-based approach, allowing you to create new interfaces to existing information. Generating web-enabled solutions for your NonStop™ server requires special attention to the concerns of availability, scalability, fault-tolerance, on-line configuration support, security, and cost-effective performance. Web services addresses these concerns using open standards, allowing interface development solutions that are reliable, easily extensible, simple to manage, and secure.

Communicating over TCP/IP networks using standard protocols such as the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Web services utilizes Extensible Markup Language (XML) to describe what your data message is, a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) "envelope" to encapsulate the data message, and the Web services Definition Language (WSDL) to define how the requestor and/or responder send and receive the message.

This approach allows for a new, platform-independent way to call methods located on diverse, distributed systems and to make procedure calls over internet-based networks. The result is the potential for applications written in one language on one platform to consume the services of applications written in a completely different language on a completely different platform.

The real key to Web services is the ease with which applications, built using different architectures, can interoperate - without the need for developers to have an intricate knowledge and understanding of the system to which they are trying to connect.

Simply stated, Web services affords you the flexibility to create modern connections to your older applications (maintaining your existing business rules and logic) or generate new applications easier than traditional methods.