This document discusses web services and the service-oriented architecture. It begins by defining a web service as a network-accessible interface to application functionality built using standard Internet technologies. It then describes the key components of the web services technology stack, including discovery, description, packaging, transport, and network layers. Finally, it provides an overview of the steps to create a web services, including writing the web service method, describing it with WSDL, writing a proxy, and writing a client to invoke the proxy.