Chapter 3. Web Services: A Realization of SOA

People often think of Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in combination, but they are distinct in an important way. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Service-Oriented Architectures,” SOA represents an abstract architectural concept. It’s an approach to building software systems that is based on loosely coupled components (services) that have been described in a uniform way and that can be discovered and composed. Web services represents one important approach to realizing an SOA.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has managed the evolution of the SOAP and WSDL specifications, defines Web services as follows:

A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction ...

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