Last year, American corporations spent over $4 billion integrating heterogeneous applications (otherwise known as Enterprise Application Integration or EAI). Why? Because one of the best ways to squeeze more profits out of a company is to reduce the costs of doing business. Among the many other possibilities of boosting the bottom line(some of which have now been identified as illegal) is finding ways to streamline the flow of information through the corporation.

But what does that salute to business motherhood and apple pie have to do with web services? Because the pressure to lower costs is the reason that almost every developer should pay attention to the innovations and standards that are at play in the web services arena. Even with all of the hype surrounding the technology, it seems likely that web services will play a large role in EAI for the next few years at least. It is for this reason that we're creating this series of articles. Our goal is to walk developers through the process of designing and implementing a commercial-grade web service.

To make sure that we're starting on the same page, the rest of this article will focus on some definitions. If you're already familiar with XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, feel free to skip to the next article. Otherwise, read on to learn about the alphabet soup that surrounds web services