Different organisations and authors describe the term 'Web Services' in slightly different ways. One such definition describes a web service as being a piece of software functionality that is accessible over a network and built on technologies that are independant of platform, programming language and component model. To enable platform, programming and component model independence, web services make use of XML protocols for communication. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the most widely used XML protocol by web services. More on Web Services....

SOAP is an XML-based communication protocol and encoding format for inter-application communication. SOAP is now a W3C standard and version 1.1 is in widespread use as the communication protocol of Web Services. SOAP version 2.2 is currently being finalised. More on SOAP....

AXIS is an open source web service toolkit for Java. It is a successor to the Apache Soap Toolkit. It fully supports SOAP version 1.1, and support for version 1.2 is being continually added as the specification is finalised. The current version of Axis is written in Java and runs as a servlet in a servlet container (most commonly Tomcat 4.0.1 and above), but a C++ version is being developed. AXIS is supported by major players like IBM, Macromedia and Computer Associates in its development and is reputed to be the best and most compliant implementation of SOAP for Java. More on AXIS....