Overview of Web Services
Use web services to integrate web-based applications into your Oracle Applications Cloud. Web services expose business objects and processes to other applications using open standards-based technologies.
Web services support development environments and clients that comply with these open standards:
- 
            Extensible Markup Language (XML) 
- 
            Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 
- 
            Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) 
- 
            Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 
- 
            XML Schema Definitions (XSD) 
Oracle Applications Cloud has these two types of web services:
- 
            Application Development Framework (ADF) services 
- 
            Composite services 
Let's look at the web service types in detail.
| Web Service Type | Description | 
|---|---|
| ADF services | ADF services usually represent business objects, such as employees or purchase orders. You can use these services to expose standard operations, such as create, update, and delete. However, for locally-persisted objects, ADF services aren't limited to these operations. Here are a few examples of ADF services and what they're used for: 
 | 
| Composite services | Composite services usually represent end-to-end business process flows that act on business events produced by the ADF services. You can use these services to manage multiple object-based services, rules services, and human workflows. Here are a few examples of composite services and what they're used for: 
 | 
For more information about web services, see the SOAP Web Services guide for your cloud services.