What is a Web service?

In general there are two parts to a Web service:

• The requester, or client, which issues a request to a server.

• The server. This can be an external web server such as IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS), but it need not be. Bespoke service code running on the server does some processing on behalf of the client, and typically sends a reply to the client.

The Web request has two parts

• The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of a service.

• A stream of data which the remote server processes and responds to. This is often a SOAP or other web service request and response in XML.