Software superglue [Web services]

It is still early days for Web services but they have recently become one of the hottest issues within the software industry. In a nutshell, Web services are a set of standards based technologies that allow software engineers to connect up a multitude of proprietary IT systems quickly and flexibly. They provide a neutral 'glue' that, in effect, makes lots of different technologies look the same. Based on these standards, software engineers are able to build reusable software components that can reside on any device and communicate with any service (regardless of its native technology) across any Internet protocol (IP) based network.