Web services

Web services are self-contained, modular applications that you can describe, publish, locate, and invoke over a network. Web services reflect a new, service-oriented approach to programming. This approach is based on the idea of building applications by discovering and implementing network services or by invoking available applications to accomplish some task. This approach is independent of specific programming languages or operating systems. Web services delivers interoperability; the ability for components created in different programming languages to work together as if they were created using the same language. Web services rely on existing transport technologies, such as HTTP or Java Messaging Service (JMS), and standard data encoding techniques, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), for invoking the implementation.

See these topics for more information about Web services:

Web services overview
See this topic for an overview of Web services architecture and operations.

Migrate Web services
If you have Web services applications that were developed for WAS Version 4, see this topic for migration instructions.

Develop Web services
See this topic for information about developing Web services and Web services clients.

Assemble Web services
See this topic for information about packaging your Web services applications for deployment.

Deploy Web services
This topic describes how to install your Web services application into the application server run time.

Configure Web services
See this topic for information about Web services configuration, including configuration scripts, security, JMS as the Web services transport, and Network Deployment components (such as the WebSphere UDDI registry and Web services gateway).

Web services resources
See this topic for additional information about Web services.