Web Services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered via the Web. In
a typical Web services scenario, a business application sends a request to a service at a given
URL using the SOAP protocol over HTTP. The service receives the request, processes it,
and returns a response. As example of this consider a stock quote service, in which the
request asks for the current price of a specified stock, and the response gives the stock price.
This is one of the simplest forms of a Web service in that the request is filled almost
immediately, with the request and response being parts of the same method call.