1. Web Services: What, Why, and Where?

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

—Shakespeare

Web services are modular, self-contained “applications” or application logic developed per a set of open standards. That much is immutable and indubitable. There is even concurrence of this application-centric viewpoint from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www.w3.org), the ultimate ratifiers of Web-related interoperability standards and in effect the godparents of Web services. W3C now has a definition, albeit in draft form, of Web services, within the emerging Web Services Architecture specification, which states categorically that a Web service is indeed a software system. This stake in the ground from W3C goes a long way toward helping rationalize prior conflicting views on exactly what constitutes a Web service, though it is only fair to note that this decisive description was formulated 2 years after the advent of Web services.