Web services share and exchange data and can be considered to be at the hub of the latest software applications. Imagine different software components running in different organisations (say a hospital, a doctor's surgery, a pharmacy and a bank). If those components were built as web services, they could be made to work together to perform a special business task. For example, an automated prescription and drug delivery service following an out-patient's hospital visit. The hospital gets patient information from the surgery and places a prescription with the pharmacy. The out-patient verifies credit card details and a payment is made from the bank to the pharmacy. Finally, the pharmacy despatches the drugs to the patient's home. This is just one of many complex scenarios that can be automated through web services.

Web services can be called from a remote Windows interface or web browser including those built for wireless or mobile devices. Wavepage can build dedicated web services for exclusive use within your organisation, or link and tie these together with remote web services from different organisations, seamlessly using these as part of your in-house application or public web site.

It's important to note that web services can run on a single desktop PC as well as a network or the Internet (you don't have to call the service from afar!) - so it makes perfect sense to build all software this way for future portability.

Imagine a new type of software application comprising of a database, a web service and Windows* or web forms (known as the graphical user interface i.e. the part the user sees). These 3 components can be deployed and run from a single desktop, an Internet web server, distributed across a private network or shared between companies. Any part of the application may be downloaded by the business team, its suppliers or customers. These downloads can be free or paid for by subscription (if software is supplied as a service) or more conventionally by one off licence payment so a company can generate revenue by offering software to its customers.

Taking things a step further, you can imagine what it would be like to distribute these components across multiple networks:

Using the concepts behind web services, we can build a sophisticated distributed architecture. Distributed components can 'talk' to each other and pass documents or messages between themselves using XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The documents and messages can be sent transparently across internal networks or externally through virtual private networks providing the receiver has a 'negotiating contract' to receive them.

As the documents move from server to server, their content and format can be changed (a hospital may only wish to send part of a document to a doctor's surgery, for example). These XML documents can be outputted to different hardware devices including those suitable for mobile or wireless computing (e.g. Pocket PC, mobile phone) as well as conventional PC’s. According to the device, the interface can be 'classic Windows' or browser based – the former being richer and more powerful. These program interfaces can be said to consume the web services to which they are bound.

Even if an organisation has no immediate plans to deploy web services or go wireless, it makes sense to build new software components this way for future development.

Finally, just like using Yellow Pages, web services can be found using an Internet based directory called Universal Description, Discovery & Integration (UDDI). Please visit http://www.UDDI.org for more information on the publishing of web services.