Web Services: Introduction and State of the Art

Abstract

In this paper we provide a brief introduction to Web Services, including the main specifications: SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. We also describe other specifications that complement them and provide solutions to aspects needed to develop service oriented architectures based on Web Services. We also address some of the research issues open, including the semantic description of services, which is one of the issues to which more effort is being devoted currently. Finally, we list the main areas where Web Service technology is being applied successfully in the context of enterprises