This document provides an overview of web services. It defines a web service as a web page meant to be consumed programmatically rather than via a web browser. Examples given include e-commerce sites using shipping APIs and weather data being provided to news sites. Benefits outlined are simplicity, loose coupling, statelessness, and firewall friendliness. The document also discusses when to use and avoid web services and describes the main types - SOAP and REST. It provides details on RESTful services using JAX-RS annotations and extracting parameters. For SOAP, it explains the communication protocol and use of WSDL and UDDI.
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