Abstract
In complex IT environments it is often necessary to integrate
different information systems with each other, exchange data between
software tools and automate actions based on events arising from user
interaction. Web Services is a popular way to make remote functions
available to a broad range of clients. A WebService is independent
from platforms and programming languages. XML Messages are exchanged
through common protocols like TCP/IP or SMTP, processed and returned
(request/ response paradigm).
Because of their nature, WebServices are a great technology to
overcome system boundaries and to "orchestrate" your IT environment.
They make up the basis for SOA and are the pieces that assemble
automated business processes.
XServices is a collection of pre-build WebServices with the
intention to avoid duplicate work and "re-inventing the wheel". The
historical base for XServices is the 'XBridgeNG' software, which
provided a set of Apache Ant Tasks with quite the same intention. The
available WebService operations are most likely the "most wanted"
ones, some of them for sure are "must have". This collection may
overlap with other libraries. In summary the current version contains
8 WebServices with over 50 operations.