9. EAI and Web services

Web services have been defined as the next generation of distributed processing. Specialized marketing brochures promise huge cost savings and minimal integration effort. Hundreds of software publishers now define themselves as Web services companies. Let's take a closer look at what Web services are, what they do and how they relate to EAI.

Web services are based on a technology that enables applications to communicate remotely via the Internet, independently of the platforms and languages on which they run.

Web services are based on a set of protocols that standardize the way these application components are invoked. These include XML-based protocols such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) (figure 14...