A Survey of Web service technologies

The Web has become the means for organizations to deliver goods and services and for customers to search and retrieve services that match their needs. Web services are self-contained, Internet-enabled applications capable not only of performing business activities on their own, but also possessing the ability to engage other web services in order to complete higher-order business transactions. Simple web services may provide simple functions such as credit checking and authorization, inventory status checking, or weather reporting, while complex services may appropriately unify disparate business functionality to provide a whole range of automated processes such as insurance brokering, travel planning, insurance liability services or package tracking. The act of building applications and processes as sets of interoperating services is enabled by means of unified service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA introduces a new philosophy for building distributed applications where elementary services can be published, discovered and bound together to create more complex valued-added services. This article aims at providing a comprehensive survey of web service technologies, examining its usage, its relation with other technologies, the newest developments in the field, architectural models and standards. The article presents an extended architecture on the basis of whose functional layers we taxonomize research activities.