Web Services resources

You can use the following resources to develop and publish your own Web Services.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has existed for almost ten years. Its objective is to develop common protocols and to recommend standards that promote Internet interoperability. There are over 400 member organizations who contribute to forming recommendations for standards and best practices among Internet developers. The W3C provides leadership in an array of Web technologies (including XML, HTML, and similar areas of interest) by creating working groups that gather and publish information and recommendations.

You can find the WSDL schema and SOAP schemas published and propagated by IBM and Microsoft at schemas.xmlsoap.org. The W3C has complete descriptions of the schema elements for both SOAP and WSDL. See the W3C Web site for the most recent working draft of SOAP and WSDL recommendations.

There are third party tool kits that simplify creating a Web Service. For example, Apache Axis and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET are development tool kits you can use to create a custom Web Services client directly from the Service Manager Web Services API WSDL.

If you are interested in examples of working Web service WSDL files, programmatic interfaces, tutorials, samples, and a list of available Web services, see the Xmethods Web site. Also see the resources listed below: