Web services are loosely coupled autonomous web applications that integrate with other web applications, without the need to build custom‑connection code. Domino 7 extends its embrace of open standards by adding formalized support for web services. Web services can extend the reach of your existing Domino applications, as well as provide new applications with industry-standard integration points.

Before discussing Domino-based web services, let's first identify a few characteristics that apply generally to web services. Web services consist of service providers and service consumers. They are made possible by a set of technologies used to build programmatic interfaces for systems to communicate data on a network:

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is used to encode structured data to form the request and response information exchanged between the web‑service client and the web‑service provider. As it is text based, it is portable across platforms and easily...