Microsoft .Net™ | Web services

Web services are a specific form of middleware. Web services make it possible for different (business-critical) applications to communicate with each other, exchange data and activate particular program modules remotely. Web services are a combination of concepts and technologies and use web standards such as HTTP and XML which allow applications to communicate with one another via the internet, independently of the language in which they were developed and the platform on which they run. Web services are partly made possible by the successful combination of Java™ and XML, HintTech's speciality.

Many enterprises have invested in ICT in recent years. Many front-end and back-end processes, such as financial systems, web sites and production, have been partially or fully automated. However, these often business-critical systems carry out specific tasks and are not usually able to communicate with each other and so create a coherent system. This means that information in these different systems cannot be shared with other systems.

The power of Web services lies in the fact that they are self-describing: in other words, one application can ask another application how to call the web services and which parameters will be returned. The following specific web service standards are used for this: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). These Internet standards are used by both the Microsoft .Net architecture and IBM's WebSphere Java (J2EE) architecture.

By using web services, HintTech is able to integrate systems and enable software applications to communicate with each other, without high costs for extra hardware and software.