STANDARS BASED: The connections are based upon vendor-independent standards. The development of generally open and accepted standards is a key strength of the coalitions that have been building web services infrastructure. Most previous efforts at distributed computing (e.g., CORBA, DCOM, RMI, and others) were very difficult to implement, because they were dependent upon a particular vendor’s product offering, highly specified, or programmatically complex—usually all of the above.
PROCESS CENTRIC: Systems are conceived from a process-centric perspective. By intent, services are designed with a task-orientation; they function as discrete steps in a larger workflow or business process. A well designed service describes its inputs and outputs in a way that other software can determine what it does, how to invoke its functionality, and what result to expect in return.