The term "Web Services" can be confusing. It is, unfortunately, often used in many different ways. Compounding this confusion is term "services" that has a different meaning than the term "Web Services." On this site, the term Web Services refers to the technologies that allow for making connections. Services are what you connect together using Web Services. A service is the endpoint of a connection. Also, a service has some type of underlying computer system that supports the connection offered. The combination of services - internal and external to an organization - make up a service-oriented architecture.

Learn how to create an external interface to an enterprise service.

Read a summary of the major Best Practices covered in the column during the past year.

Learn the benefits of carrying existing assets into the future with a service-oriented architecture.

Kendall Clark digs into the latest draft of the W3C's Web Services Architecture document, finding both curious anomaly and commendable progress

This white paper describes Microsoft's global web services architecture and four new specifications for developing web services (WS-Security, WS-License, WS-Routing, and WS-Referral). The architecture uses SOAP and XML for interoperability.

WSXL is a component model that is being submitted by IBM to the OASIS Web Services Component Model Technical Committee. WSXL supports different types of components for data, presentation, and control. Developers can use declarative language based on XLink and XML Events to build control components.

Brian Buehling presents questions to ask yourself before commencing the planning and implementation of a web services strategy in your organization.

WebServices.XML.com is a new sister site to XML.com, which will cover topics related to web services and Internet-wide computing. Managing Editor Edd Dumbill provides an introduction to the new site, and guidelines for potential authors

In this fourth and final part of our series on web services security, we put all the pieces together to demonstrate how the XML Signature, XML encryption, Web Services Security, and SAML specifications work together

The first in a four part series discussing major issues related to securing web services and covering the emerging XML-based security standards from the W3C and OASIS

In the second part of his series on web services security technology, Bilal Siddiqui discusses the role and function of digital signatures and encryption

In the third and final part of our series on web services transactions, Faheem Kham examines the WS-Transaction spec's Business Activities, a way of handling long lived collections of transactions

In the second installment of our series on web service transactions, Faheem Khan examines in detail the operation of atomic transactions in an example enterprise application scenario, using the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction specifications

In his newest column, Rich Salz outlines a proposal for an interface definition language, called RSWS, that's simpler than WSDL and tuned for document-style services

Using the flexibility afforded by defining data in XML and parsing it with XPATH, you can develop a decoupled servlet that serves up business graphics. 

There are several basic aspects of Web service design that, when mastered, make a successful project: