Chapter 1. Introduction to Web Services

“Web services are based on a breakthrough architecture offering modularity, reusability, and extensibility of business transactions. By exposing back-end monolithic applications as services, it has helped us decrease by 50 percent our e-commerce storefronts while providing overall better customer experience and reduced costs.”

—Craig Flower, Vice President, eBusiness and Customer Operations IT, Hewlett Packard

We are living in one of the most exciting times for an IT professional. An interesting transformation is taking place in the design, development, and deployment of distributed applications. Today, we're seeing the emergence of an entirely new approach to corporate information systems: web services. This will provide significant cost savings to businesses while creating new opportunities for growth.