About Web Services

Working with Web Services > About Web Services

	About Web Services

The term Web services can be defined as a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications. These Web services use technologies such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web services Description Language), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration). Generally, Web services use these technologies as follows:

XML to tag the data

SOAP to transfer the data

WSDL to describe, in standard terms, the services available

UDDI to list what services are available

For example, a Web service can be created to:

Look up and return the current value of stocks

Look up and return the weather forecast for various cities

Book flight or car rental reservations

In short, Web services, like other forms of software, can be created to perform a wide range and variety of functions.

Important:

When selecting a Web service, be careful to avoid selecting a service that uses overloading of operations. Overloading of operations is not supported in the SOAP 1.2 standard and is known to cause problems.

Note:

Axis ships with the tool Tcpmon for monitoring HTTP traffic. We recommend that this tool be used when debugging Web services. Documentation on how to use Tcpmon can be found at: http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/user-guide.html#AppendixUsingTheAxisTCPMonitorTcpmon