In the world of web design, web services are a catalyst for the next generation of e-business, that of dynamic e-business. Some has stated that they will "enable dynamic e-business using open Internet standards so that their customers gain the highest level of business advantage".

Web Services are based on the already existing and well-known HTTP protocol, and uses XML as the base language. This means that web services are a very developer-friendly service system. However, technologies such as RMI, COM, and CORBA involve a whole learning curve. New technologies and languages have to be learnt to implement these services.

Also, Web Services is based on a set of standardized rules and specifications, making it more portable. This was not the case with the legacy technologies which were used earlier.

In Web Services, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL are widely used, and are summarised below:

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the method by which you can send messages across different modules. This is similar to how you communicate with the search engine that contains an index with the websites registered in the index associated with the keywords.
• UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is the global lookup base for locating the services.
• WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) is the method through which different services are described in the UDDI.

Web Services in both the business and web design world, in the most simplistic fashion, provides a mechanism of communication between two remote systems, connected through the network of the Web Services.

Basic service-oriented architecture for Web Services has:

1. a standard way for communication
2. a uniform data representation and exchange mechanism
3. a standard meta language to describe the services offered
4. a mechanism to register and locate Web Services-based applications

If you would like to know more about web services or how they have affected the web design and business industries, why not contact Strawberrysoup, who specialise in creative web design using the latest technology and industry standards?