Is the web service concept a new revolutionary technology? The idea of splitting large programs into small modules is an established principle of higher-level programming languages. Even in the time of assembler programming, procedures were separated from the other program parts for a better reusability. In fact, the popularity of web services is caused by the standardisation of techniques and by the standards that are open enough to be adapted to different situations. So the developer is not committed to a concrete realisation of these concepts. There always exist more solutions to realise the concepts of web services.
In this chapter, we discussed the main ways of enabling the SOA functionally in your organization. There we discussed three main approaches—existing messaging system, plain old XML, and web services. We then looked at the standard bodies of web service and the web service model. Finally, we discussed Apache Axis2 and how to download and use it.
In the next chapter, we will discuss Axis2 architecture, key components, and key features.