- soap:Simple Object Access Protocol
简单对象访问协议（SOAP）是一种轻量的、简单的、基于 XML 的协议，它被设计成在 WEB 上交换结构化的和固化的信息。 SOAP 可以和现存的许多因特网协议和格式结合使用，包括超文本传输协议（ HTTP），简单邮件传输协议（SMTP），多用途网际邮件扩充协议（MIME）。它还支持从消息系统到远程过程调用（RPC）等大量的应用程序。
- REST(Representational State Transfer表述性状态转移)
- Web Services 是一种思想，一种模式。一般的实现由基于soap的和REST的
WSDL:Web Services Description Language
WebService原来有两种方式，一是SOAP协议方式，在这种方式下需要WSDL,UDDI等，二是REST方式，这种方式根本不需要WSDL,UDDI等。而且REST方式现在看来是更加流行，更有前途的方式。
有很多
WEB服务/SOAP/SOA开源软件：http://www.oschina.net/project/tag/138/webservices
A web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the World Wide Web. A web service is a software function provided at a network address over the web or the cloud, it is a service that is "always on" as in the concept of utility computing.
The W3C defines a "Web service" as:
[...] a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. [1]
The W3C also states:
We can identify two major classes of Web services:
- REST-compliant Web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of "stateless" operations; and
- arbitrary Web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations.[2]