An information processing system comprises a legacy application, a web services consumption copybook, and a set of application program interfaces for enabling the legacy application to access a selected web service via a web services consumption server. The web services consumption copybook represents data structures of the selected web service. The system can either connect to or include a set of web service proxies that each correspond to a web service available via a network connection. A web services consumption server is optionally used to route service requests from the application to the appropriate web service proxy. The system can also optionally include a developer tool for adapting legacy systems or environments to be able to consume web services using modem protocols thus allowing the migration of legacy subsystems to a networked loosely-coupled environment.