Web Services describe one web server (or even a smart client applet) getting information or running an application program from a remote web-accessible Application Server.

An RSS News Feed? is a prime example of a web service.

Distributed applications put part of their business logic on remote servers where key data can be accessed locally.

For example, a web service provider might publish current stock prices. A web service requestor looking for stock quotes can use UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) to retrieve the published interface (the public methods and properties of the remote web service) written in WSDL? (Web Service Description Language).

Then it can use XML-RPC - XML-RemoteProcedureCall), or SOAP? - Simple Object Application Protocol?, to exchange information with the web service, most simply using the HTTP protocol, which moves easily through firewalls.

Web Services over HTTP have become wildly successful compared to previous attempts to build distributed applications using complex and platform dependent schemes like CORBA and DCOM.

And the leading industry-standard method for exchanging electronic data between businesses (purchase orders, invoices), called EDI? - Electronic Data Interchange - is being replaced rapidly by XML data exchange.

Object-oriented Web Services connectors and adapters are critically important tools for content management systems that integrate legacy databases into a Virtual Repository?.

An Enterprise Content Management making extensive use of Web Services is said to use a Service Oriented Architecture.