Development & Web Services

Web services are an approach that helps the business connect with its customers, partners, and employees. They enable the business to extend existing services to new customers. They help the business work more efficiently with its partners and suppliers. They unlock information so it can flow to every employee who needs it. They reduce development time and expense for new projects.

• By enabling applications to share data across different hardware platforms and operating systems, Web services provide many benefits, including:
• Opening the door to new business opportunities by making it easy to connect with partners.
• Delivering dramatically more personal, integrated experiences to users through the new breed of smart devices—including PCs.
• Saving time and money by cutting development time.
• Increasing revenue streams by enabling businesses to easily make their own Web services available to others.

Web services are revolutionizing how applications talk to other applications—or, more broadly, how computers talk to other computers—by providing a universal data format that lets data be easily adapted or transformed. Based on XML, the universal language of Internet data exchange, Web services can communicate across platforms and operating systems, regardless of the programming language in which the applications are written. Each Web service is a discrete unit of code that handles a limited set of tasks. However, although Web services remain independent of each other, they can loosely link themselves into a collaborating group that performs a particular task.