What is a Web Service?

A Web Service is simply a set of related methods that a client application can invoke using SOAP.

More specifically, a Web Service does the following:

1. It contains a description of a service's available methods in a WSDL (Web Services Description Language) document. This description includes the names of the methods as well as their parameters and return types (specified via, you guessed it, an XML Schema).

2. It implements a SOAP processor so that a client application can invoke the Web Service methods.

There is a lot of machinery required to produce a Web Service. Fortunately, Caché does all the hard parts automatically.