JBoss.org Community Documentation

5.1. Who needs web services?

Enterprise systems communication may benefit from a wise adoption of WS technologies. Exposing well designed contracts allows developers to extract an abstract view of their service capabilities. Considering the standardized way contracts are written, this definitely helps communication with third-party systems and eventually support business-to-business integration. No more agreement required on vendor specific implementation details, home-brew communication protocol or custom per-customer settings. Everything is clear and standardized in the contract the provider and consumer agree on. Of course this also reduces the dependencies between implementations allowing other consumers to easily use the provided service without major changes.

Enterprise system may benefit from web service technologies also for internal heterogenous subsystems communication. As a matter of fact their interoperability boosts service reuse and composition. No more need to rewrite whole functionalities only because they were developed by another enterprise department using another software language.