Understanding web services

Not so long time 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 hyper-linked with each other through special Uniform Resource Locators (URL) and anyone reading a document inside of a web browser program would be able to jump directly to a referenced hyper-text 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, that 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 and something that nowadays we take for granted when opening our favorite web browser and searching for information...