The following figure shows the basic Web services architecture supported by the industry. This architecture is common to all implementations of Web services.
Figure 19. Web services architecture
In the above figure, the set of components required for Web services appear with gray shading. The dashed arrow shows that the WSDL reflects the application server interface, but does not come directly from the application server, itself. The following sections describe how this architecture works and provide more information on the advantages that have increasingly made Web services an industry standard.
