What are Web Services?
  Web services are application components
  Web services communicate using open protocols
  Web services are self-contained and self-describing
  Web services can be discovered using UDDI
  Web services can be used by other applications
  XML is the basis for Web services
The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP.The HTTP protocol is the most used Internet protocol.XML provides a language which can be used between different platforms and programming languages and still express complex messages and functions.Web services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without time-consuming custom coding, and because all communication is in XML, Web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language. For example, Java can talk with Perl, Windows applications can talk with UNIX applications. Web services platform elements are:
  SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
  UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
  WSDL (Web Services Description Language)