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

2.1. Overview of Web Service Standards

Standards differ from technologies. Standards are a collection of specifications, rules, and guidelines formulated and accepted by the leading market participants. While these rules and guidelines prescribe a common way to achieve the standard's stated goal, they do not prescribe implementation details. Individual participants devise their own implementations of an accepted standard according to the standard's guidelines and rules. These various implementations of a standard by different vendors give rise to a variety of technologies. However, despite the implementation detail differences, the technologies can work together if they have been developed according to the standard's specifications.

For Web services ...