<para>In complex IT environments it is often necessary to integrate different information systems with each other, exchange data between software tools and automate actions based on events arising from user interaction. Web Services is a popular way to make remote functions available to a broad range of clients. A WebService is independent from platforms and programming languages. XML Messages are exchanged through common protocols like TCP/IP or SMTP, processed and returned (request/ response paradigm).</para>
<para>Because of their nature, WebServices are a great technology to overcome system boundaries and to "orchestrate" your IT environment. They make up the basis for SOA and are the pieces that assemble automated business processes.</para>
<para>XServices is a collection of pre-build WebServices with the intention to avoid duplicate work and "re-inventing the wheel". The historical base for XServices is the 'XBridgeNG' software, which provided a set of Apache Ant Tasks with quite the same intention. The available WebService operations are most likely the "most wanted" ones, some of the for sure are "must have". This collection may overlap with other libraries. In summary the current version contains 8 WebServices with over 50 operations.</para>
