Various sites featuring technical articles, examples of code and forums are cropping up on the Web. For example, PerfectXML for SOAP or Soaprc.com are Web sites offering support, mailing lists and resources for SOAP.

There are also many other resources available, and we have listed some of these at the end of this article.

Worth special mention are the portals which reference available Web Services, although their content can be fairly sparse or simply formulated. This is the case with The Mind Electric, presented as a Web service portal which aims to "design, build and license forward-thinking distributed computing infrastructure." Although still incomplete, this type of portal should develop quickly, using UDDI in particular.

The concept of Web Services has frequently featured in recent TrendMarkers articles, such as No place like Smart home (December 2000) and The Ins and Outs of Web Syndication (November 2000).

It is easy to pinpoint the building blocks which today are enabling the concept of Web Services to become a reality:

• XML : a technology used to describe information
• UDDI : to find the necessary services
• WSDL : to describe how Web Services work
• SOAP : to remotely execute Web Services

These four technologies are closely linked, although closer inspection highlights the two basic standards that have led to the Internet's success: HTTP and XML (bear in mind that HTML is derived from XML).

This is why we recommend that you begin experimenting with all of this technology within your distributed applications.