Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML Technologies

1.2. Benefits of Web Services

Web services are gaining in popularity because of the benefits they provide. Listed here are some of the key benefits:

• Interoperability in a heterogeneous environment— Probably the key benefit of the Web service model is that it permits different distributed services to run on a variety of software platforms and architectures, and allows them to be written in different programming languages. As enterprises develop over time, they add systems and solutions that often require different platforms and frequently don't communicate with each other. Later, perhaps due to a consolidation or the addition of another application, it becomes necessary to tie together this disparate functionality. The greatest strength of Web ...