Date: Oct. 20, 2001
Link: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/08/07/webservices.html
Source Author or Organization: Al Saganich, BEA Systems, ONJava.com

In this article BEA Systems senior engineer Al Saganich looks at Web services, a new form of platform-agnostic, distributed computing environment built upon XML functionality.

Saganich traces the evolution of Web services from Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) to the three technologies recognized as the base architecture today: a mechanism for finding services, a mechanism for registering services and a mechanism for communicating via XML in a distributed environment. He then examines how XML, Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Web Services Definition Language (WSDL), Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) provide those services today.