Web Services allow us to develop functionality that can be accessed across a network. What makes web services different from other similar technologies such as EJBs or Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is that they are language and platform independent, for example, a web service developed in Java might be accessed by clients written in other languages and vice versa.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Introduction to web services
Creating a simple web service
Creating a web service client
Exposing EJBs as web services