1. A storage medium including software system applications for providing access to web services, comprising: a protocol adapter that intercepts a web service invoke request wherein the invoke request is a web service message that has a message format and includes parameters, converts the message format of the invoke request, creates an initial message context including the invoke request, a placeholder for a response, and information about a transport, and routes the invoke request with the initial message context to an appropriate web services container based on a target of the invoke request; a container driver, at the web services container, that receives the invoke request and initial message context from the protocol adapter; a plurality of interceptors, utilized by the container driver to access inbound and outbound web service messages; wherein the container driver forwards the initial message context to one of the plurality of interceptors that receives the initial message context which includes a plurality of parts, wherein each part includes corresponding content, modifies the content of one or more of the parts of the initial message context to produce modified message context, and returns the modified message context to the container driver; an invocation handler that receives the modified message context from said container driver, passes the parameters from the modified message context to the target of the request, processes values returned from the target, and passes the values to the container driver, such that the container driver can formulate a response to the invoke request; and an invocation context that stores context data for processing the invoke request including a conversation ID, a message sequence number, and a security token, wherein the invocation context is an inheritable, thread local object which is accessible to the protocol adapter, interceptors and invocation handler, and wherein the invocation handler controls read/write access to the invocation context.