A user asked me, what are Web Services?
Although several other items in the GT 4 glossary are described in terms
of Web Services, the term Web Services does not have an entry.
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.0/GT40_Glossary.html
So I took it upon myself to research this term on the web.
It appears that Web Services is one of those doohickies that defies a
single-paragraph, or even single-page, definition.
The closest thing to a description I found in the Globus documentation is in
http://www-unix.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.0/common/key/
This description is very specific to Globus however.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/Web_services.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service
(the W3C definition is notably non-descriptive)
I would propose this (still multi-line, but relatively compact yet accurate)
===========================================================================
Web Services denotes a standardized system for applications to exchange
information over networks through a network firewall, using a combination of
HTTP -- low-level communications protocol
SOAP -- for XML message encoding and exchange
WSDL -- (Web Services Description Language) describes available Web Services
A Web Service is a program that processes SOAP messages coming through a
network. In operation, it generates a proxy program that manages
communications on behalf of a client application.
The standardized Web Services include
WS-Security
WS-Addressing
WS-Notification
WS-Reliability
WS-Transaction
===========================================================================
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