I am new to Webservice and trying to learn the basics. One thing that I found in most of the implementations was that tutorials show creation of both WebService client and the actual WebService in say AXIS.
Now as far as I understand, the reason for webService is interoperability between different languages. This is not happening here. Further, how can an AXIS client interact with service not written using AXIS. I know the question is very dumb but it is bugging me a lot
Web services are XML descriptions that tell us:
The invocation of a web service rides on a transport protocol, such as HTTP, RPC, etc. Coupled with the above XML, this technology stack defines the web service's interface. The language in which the business logic of a web service is constructed is independent of the web service itself. It just needs to implement to that XML contract.
Axis is a toolkit that makes it easy to create and deploy these web services, building you a C++ or Java web server. So, Axis is not defining new specifications on how a service communicates, it is just simplifying the process of integrating business logic into a web service.
Here is a great article which helps unify the concept of Web Services and Axis
Well, to begin:
Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") submission to W3C. (1)
SOAP was designed to provide support for remote procedure calls, or RPC's. You can read more about SOAP and its characteristics here.
It is language independent because it uses XML, not a particular programming language. It is then up to language creators or third parties to provide support to SOAP by creating libraries or APIs that can easily integrate handling SOAP messages. You'll see that most languages provide support to SOAP by performing a simple Google search for " SOAP library".
That's pretty much it. Let me know in the comments if you'd like to know some more.
