Despite the large number of approaches and techniques proposed to solve the Arabic handwriting recognition problems, the corresponding results remain weak. Indeed, intensive experiments revealed that such approaches and techniques are unable to deal properly especially with large quantity of handwritten Arabic documents. The complex morphology of the Arabic writing is mainly behind this weakness. A deep study of some of these existing proposed approaches and techniques revealed fortunately their complementarity. Such a complementarity can be exploited on making them collaborating together in a flexible manner. This flexible collaboration can improve substantially the recognition rate and may be leading consequently to building powerful Arabic handwriting systems. Web services seem to be an adequate technology which can make possible the flexible collaboration of several approaches and techniques to solve certain problems. Consequently, we present first in this paper a comprehensive review of Arabic handwriting recognition commonly known as Arabic Optical Character Recognition (AOCR) approaches and techniques. Then, we present our idea which consists to build AOCR based on the flexible collaboration of two or more complementary approaches and techniques by using web service technology.