Web Services

Web Services (Extension of a distributed computing framework) Web Services are a new breed of Web application. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. Web Services perform the functions that can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. Once a Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web Services) can discover and invoke the deployed service.

So what does business stand to gain from Web Services? Well, those businesses which par take of this framework will have greater and more instant access to customers, consumers, and vendors, which literally span the entire globe. That is, of course, only for those businesses which have suitable products to take advantage of this type of medium. Booking agencies for travel, dining, theaters, cabs, etc. immediately benefit, as do those which have already managed success in the current internet market space.

The ability to centralize information in a globally accessible manner is definitely a plus for the company intranet. This has been one of the major problems in organizations, which have several divisions and even more applications. For example, the contact details of a customer or even an employee have traditionally been bound to one application and then either copied to another application via cut and paste, or via sophisticated integration programs, or completely re-entered altogether. The Web Services approach allows this information to be stored and universally retrieved by any application which requires the information, in a common and defined manner, independent of platform and programming environment. This characteristic, more than any other, is what makes Web Services the hallmark of the next generation of the information age.

The important emerging standards for Web Services are UDDI (Universal Discovery Description Integration), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) 5 and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). UDDI defines the method for discovering a Web service and WSDL describes the service to be discovered and how to access the service once it has been discovered. SOAP and XML are the underlying methods used to access the UDDI registry and communicate with the Web Services. There was some doubt about whether SOAP would ever make it to recommendation in the future as ebXML (a business to business XML protocol) was well advanced and had requirements which where not catered for by SOAP. However, the recent SOAP with attachments specification (submitted by HP) satisfies the requirements of ebXML and suitably builds on the existing work already carried out on SOAP. Still, the W3C are working on XMLP which is using SOAP as its starting point; hence it is likely that SOAP will not become the standard for XML messaging and RPC in the future.

e-Zest has the experience and the technical know how to assist you in designing, developing and deploying open standard infrastructure solutions based on Web Services, XML and related standards.

Consulting
e-Zest assist you in architecting, developing, deploying and maintaining your open standard infrastructure solutions based on Web Services framework. e-Zest provides consulting services (Business Consulting, Technical Consulting and Implementation Consulting ) for successful implementation of Web services at your organization.

Development
e-Zest (Web Services Solutions Provider) develop and deploy open standard infrastructure solutions based on Web Services, XML and related standards.

Support
e-Zest support products based on Web Services, XML and related standards throughout their life cycle