standards-based
The HP Web Services Platform supports the latest Web services industry standards including WSDL (Web Services Description Language) that defines how Web services are to be accessed and invoked; SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) a lightweight, XML-based message format for communication between Web services over the Internet; and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), a repository-based registry service for the automated lookup of Web services.

BizTalk, ebXML, RosettaNet support
In addition to SOAP-RPC support, the HP Web Services Platform will enable businesses to support virtually any XML protocol and therefore to participate in multiple trading environments. Included in the HP Web Services Platform architecture is a listener framework for receiving messages over a variety of transport protocols and a pipeline based on Cocoon2, an Apache open-source framework, for pre-processing and routing of XML documents. This framework enables the HP Web Services Platform to receive, process, and return XML documents based upon requirements detailed in business protocols such as RNIF, ebXML, or BizTalk.

developer tools and utilities
Bundled with the HP Web Services Platform are several useful tools and utilities to simplify the Web services development, registration, and discovery process. Of special importance are the HP Service Composer tool that enables developers to create the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) interface, and HP Service Registry tool for automatically registering and discovering Web services in UDDI registries. Also included are trail map tutorials that assist developers in installing and learning to use the HP Web Services Platform.

modular, plug-and-play architecture
Web services are still progressing along the adoption curve and numerous standards are in varying stages of development - standards dealing with complex Web services requirements. This includes functional areas such as security, Web-based long-duration transactioning, conversations, negotiations, management, and more. The HP Web Services Platform provides unmatched flexibility that will allow our customers to plug-in customer-specific components (such as an authentication manager or transaction server) as well as support current and future business and technology standards.

compatibility with public and private registries
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) registries provide a central repository for available Web services, thus enabling businesses to promote their services to other businesses or to locate Web services offered by other businesses. HP is one of four vendors to offer a public UDDI Business Registry along with Microsoft, IBM, and SAP. HP also offers a private UDDI registry with the HP Web Services Registry product. Based on the latest UDDI V2 specifications, HP Web Services Registry enables you to create your own private registry, or eco-system of available Web services.

always-on platform
The HP Web Services Platform is tightly integrated with the HP-AS family of J2EE-based application servers. HP-AS is built on a completely standards-based, modular architecture and provides developers with the unprecedented ability to pick-and-choose only the specific services that are required. This plug-and-play architecture removes the current complexities of developing service-based applications and allows developers to easily integrate Java services and APIs into new and existing applications. HP Web Services Platform components run as servlets within HP-AS, enabling it to benefit from the unmatched linear scalability, fault tolerance, and hot deployment and "Hot Versioning" support offered by HP-AS.