New trends in e-business: From B2B to Web Services

Today the term e-business is often used for describing attempts of using Internet for improving business efficiencies and introducing innovative new business models. Until recently, the major focus of e-business has been around replacing the traditional communication means such as telephone and fax by Internet-based electronic data interchange. The introduction of new standards such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) opened new opportunities for dynamically integrating business processes across corporate boundaries on demand. This architecture is called Web Services, and being pursued by major software vendors such as IBM and Microsoft. Web Services can also be considered as a new component-based, distributed computing architecture. This paper discusses the background of this new trend and explains the individual technologies including XML, SOAP, and UDDI that comprise the basis of Web Services.