Understanding Web Services

Not so long ago, and not in a galaxy far, far away, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. In his vision for an information management system, individual documents should be hyperlinked with each other through special Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and anyone reading a document in a web browser program should be able to jump directly to a referenced hypertext document. He was also the one who designed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and implemented the first versions of web server and web browser programs, which used the HTTP protocol for communication. The fact that his ideas were – from the very beginning – open, public, and for everyone, contributed to the enormous, global success of the World Wide Web. At that time, it wasn’t obvious that the web would become something that nowadays we take for granted, opening our favorite web browser and searching for information or reading the news.

HTTP is a simple...