Web-Services – The Next Evolutionary Stage of E-Business

Web-Services are a set of new technologies that promise to take “service-oriented” distributed computing to a whole new level, and eventually take e-business to the next evolutionary stage. Web-Services, in a nutshell, let organizations bridge communication gaps among their information systems, and build new software applications by “stitching” together existing ones. It is capable of integrating applications written in different programming languages, developed by different vendors, and running on different servers with dissimilar operating systems. WebServices would enable companies to seamlessly connect their information systems and business processes with those of their partners and customers – thus ushering in a new “service oriented” distributed computing architecture. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of Web-Services, explain the essential concepts that enable WebServices, and understand its major benefits and point out its shortcomings.