With the rapid development of e-business, web applications based on the Web are developed from localization to globalization, from B2C(business-to-customer) to B2B(business-to-business), from centralized fashion to decentralized fashion. Web service is a new application model for decentralized computing, and it is also an effective mechanism for the data and service integration on the web. Thus, web service has become a solution to e-business. It is important and necessary to carry out the research on the new architecture of web services, on the combinations with other good techniques, and on the integration of services. In this paper, a survey presents on various aspects of the research of web services from the basic concepts to the principal research problems and the underlying techniques, including data integration in web services, web service composition, semantic web service, web service discovery, web service security, the solution to web services in the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) computing environment, and the grid service, etc. This paper also presents a summary of the current art of the state of these techniques, a discussion on the future research topics, and the challenges of the web services.