New to SOA and Web services


	1. What are SOA and Web services?

	2. Getting started with emerging SOA and Web services technology

alphaWorks provides emerging Web services technologies from IBM Research and development labs that help in shaping the adoption and standardization of Web service approaches. Along with the technology downloads, there are demos, discussion forums, and resources that allow you to interact with creators of the technology and the broader user community.

1. What are SOA and Web services?

Web services are technologies that allow applications to communicate with each other in a platform- and programming language-independent manner. A Web service is a software interface that describes a collection of operations that can be accessed over the network through standardized XML messaging. It uses protocols based on the XML language to describe an operation to execute or data to exchange with another Web service. A group of Web services interacting together in this manner defines a particular Web service application in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

While Web services allow dynamic features to combine multiple services into applications, you still have to build the services first. Programming languages in computer science are continually evolving. We began decades ago with the idea of a function in which you provide some parameters, it executes some operation on those parameters, and it returns a value based on its calculations. Eventually, this first concept evolved into the object where each object had not just a number of functions it can perform, but also its own private data variables, rather than relying on external system-wide data variables that previously made it more complex to develop applications. As applications began communicating with each other, the concept of defined universal interfaces for objects became important, allowing objects on other platforms to communicate even if they were written in other programming languages and ran on other operating systems.


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2. Getting started with emerging SOA and Web services technology

Emerging Web service technologies are available in the following categories on alphaWorks:

Architecture - These tools help in setting up an efficient structure for the various components of Web service applications.
Developer Kits - These kits comprise various applications that are helpful in creating Web services.
SOAP - These tools aid in creating Web services that use SOAP.
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) - This category consists of publishing and directory utilities for Web services.
Utilities – These various tools and applications are useful for working with Web services.

Get started with these alphaWorks Web service technologies:

Emerging Technologies Toolkit, a software development kit for designing, developing, and executing emerging autonomic and grid-related technologies and Web services.
IBM Forms for Mobile Devices - A mobile forms preview, based on XML technology, that provides a robust platform on which application developers can quickly create and deploy robust, forms-based enterprise applications on mobile devices.
BPWS4J - A platform for creating and executing BPEL4WS processes.
IBM Web Services Navigator - An Eclipse/RAD plug-in for interactive visualization of Web service transactions.
The developerWorks SOA and Web services zone also has a wealth of resources including articles, tutorials, and tips.
Browse through the Web service technologies or search for a Web service topic to find a technology of interest to you. You can also join the discussion about any alphaWorks technology to learn more. And let us know what you think; your feedback is important to us is shaping the alphaWorks site and what we bring you.