Web services are also able to cater to clients independently of language, platform, and object model with the help of Web Service contracts. A contract only describes the messages the Web Service accepts and generates and the protocols that it supports. It does not specify the implementation of the service. This implies that different vendors can implement a Web service differently as long as they honor the contract. Likewise. vendors of Web service consumers (clients) can implement the client, as they want to as long as they honor the contract.
While Web Services and Web service consumers are independent of each other and interface only
through a contract, using standard Web protocols, they also require some standard language to
Communicate. Currently, XML is used as such a standard (yet extensible) (meta)-Language to describe data and commands. The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an industry standard XML-based protocol that can be used for representing data and commands in an extensible way. It can be used to exchange structured and typed information on the Web service contracts are described using the XML-based Service Contract Language (SCL) (previously known as Service Description Language, SDL). The message formats within the contracts can be specified using SOAP. Web service contracts can be published and discovered in a
standard way using the Disco specification.
These standards ensure that different Web services can be accessed in a uniform manner by both
developers and development tools.
2. Web Applications
Microsoft .NET Framework provides a common application model for Web applications irrespective of the language and technology used to build the applications. A Web application is a combination of Web pages on Web services. Each Web page and Web service can have its own URL. All these individual URLs are clubbed together and connected to a base URL, which is the URL of the starting point of the application. The starting point could be a Web page or a Web service.
The .NET Framework provides programming languages such as Visual Basic and C# as well as a
server-side technology, Active Server Pages+ (ASP+).
Common Language Specification
Since there are many languages, there are problems related to the basic architecture of these
