Web services are remote application components and expose self-contained APIs. Web services can be broadly classified based on following two standards:

• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
• Representational State Transfer (REST)

Web services can play a major role in integrating disparate applications, because they are standard-based and platform-independent.

JEE provides many specifications to simplify development and consumption of both types of web services, for example, JAX-WS (Java API for XML—web services) and JAX-RS (Java API for RESTful web services).

The preceding are just some of the specifications that are part of JEE. There are many other independent specifications and many enabling specifications, such as dependency injection and concurrency utilities, which we will see in subsequent chapters.