Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
What Are Web Services?
If you search the Internet, you will find an astounding variety of answers to
the question "What is a web service?" The only common consensus is that web
services share the following characteristics:
1. Web services use XML-based standards. As you will see in this book, web
services are built on numerous APIs, standards, and protocols. Almost all of
these systems use XML as a core component.
2. Web services use the Internet. In truth, most web services use standard
Internet protocols, including HTTP and TCP/IP. However, web service
technologies can also be deployed over messaging systems and other transport
protocols.
3. Web services are platform- and language-neutral. You can build and deploy
web services on almost any platform, using almost any language. Assuming you
use the same version(s) of the same standard(s), a client developed in Java
could easily use a web service developed in C# and hosted on Microsoft's
Internet Information Services.
The next obvious question is "How can I use web services?" The answer to this
question v ... read full excerpt from: CodeNotes for Web Services in Java and .NET ebook
