This guide provides information about the concepts and procedures needed by a developer in a Sun™ ONE Web Services Platform Developer Edition environment.

In the last couple of years, the concept of a web service (WS) has emerged as an important paradigm for general application integration in the internet environment. More particularly, WS is viewed as an important vehicle for the creation of dynamic e-business applications and as a means for the J2EE and .NET worlds to come together.

The notion of Web services exploded in June 2000 when Microsoft announced its .NET strategy for Internet-based applications and unofficially dubbed such applications "Web services." Since then IBM has touted technologies it already has as Web-services enablers and, more recently, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard proclaimed that they too have been working on Web-services technologies for some time.

IBM this week disclosed plans for updating its WebSphere Software Developer Kit (WSDK) for Web Services. WSDK 5.1 is currently being tested by developers on Big Blue's developerWorks Web site, officials said.

All accounts predict that web services, a programming method designed to enable communication between disparate systems, is the future of computing.

The important role of Web services in businesses and organizations is undisputed today. The construction and management of large Web services is still a challenge. The life cycle of a Web service includes the analysis, design, implementation and maintenance stages and Web service engineering covers all phases of Web service life cycle.

Welcome to the Web Services course. This course is designed to introduce you to the concepts and technologies associated with developing Web Services. Upon completing this course, you will be familiar with the concepts, terms, and technologies involved with Web Services.

This article is about web services. It's meant as an introduction for those of you who think that web services are only for computer nerds. They're not. If you think otherwise it might be because of the many difficult-to-read articles that have tried to address the subject, often in very technical terms.

A small, collection of FAQs on the Web Services Tool Kit for Mobile Devices.

JRun lets you publish and consume web services. Web services provide platform- and location-independent computing using XML and standard Internet protocols such as HTTP. By allowing previously incompatible applications to interoperate over the web regardless of language, platform, or operating system, web services create new business opportunities and help companies adapt to changing business relationships.

Web services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered on the Web. In a typical Web services scenario, a business application uses the SOAP protocol over HTTP to send a request to a service at an URL.

This tutorial will help participants weave a path through the alphabet soup of Web services specifications. Participants will learn the significance of each of the major Web services specifications (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), the relationship between them, as well as the standard components and tools that are available to take advantage of them.

There is little doubt that the hype associated with web services has reached astronomical proportions. Notably missing from the current flood of information, however, is a nuts-and-bolts examination of how to build applications which provide both browser-based access for human users and programmatic access for automated clients.

Conversation Support for Web Services is a technology that proposes and implements a conversational model of e-business interaction by extending and building on the Web Services architecture.

The Java platform provides a top-to-bottom, end-to-end solution for a Web services architecture. In this article, Eric Armstrong provides an overview of Sun's new Web services APIs. These latest releases provide an impressive array of performance and functionality capabilities.

The following sections provide an overview of Web services, and how they are implemented in WebLogic Server:

This QuickStart describes how to use a Web service that provides results for simple arithmetic. This Web service is described in the full .NET Framework QuickStart "Write a Simple XML Web service," for which this QuickStart provides a client application as shown in the following screen shot. To read the Web service QuickStart, click here.

Creating a Web service in .NET is easy, and so is a call to a COM object. See how to put them together when the COM object uses a single-threaded apartment model.

The SOAP RPC Technology Previewis an update to Forte for Java Enterprise Edition 3.0 that supports the creation, assembly, and deployment of SOAP RPC Web Services using the Apache SOAP runtime.

Web Services Tool Kit for Mobile Devices provides tools and run-time environments that allow development of applications that use Web Services on small mobile devices, gateway devices, and intelligent controllers. This tool kit's JavaTM Web service run-time environment is supported devices that support the J2ME, WCE, and SMF environments.