.NET Architecture—XML Web services

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

XML Web services

Today, HTML pages account for most of the traffic on the World Wide Web. With XML, however, computers have a device-independent format to use for communicating with each other on the Web. In the future, computers may use the Web and XML to communicate information rather than dedicated lines and proprietary formats such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). XMLWeb services are designed for a service-oriented Web, in which remote computers provide each other with dynamic information that can be analyzed and reformatted, before final presentation to a user. An XMLWeb service is an easy way for a computer to expose information to other computers on the Web in the form of XML.

In technical terms, an XMLWeb service on .NET is an ASP.NET page that returns XML instead of HTML to requesting clients. Such pages have a code-behind DLL containing a class that derives from the WebService class. The Visual Studio 2005 IDE provides an engine that facilitates Web service development.

An organization might choose to use XMLWeb services for two main reasons. The first reason is that they rely on HTTP; XMLWeb services can use existing networks (HTTP) as a medium for conveying information. The other is that because XMLWeb services use XML, the data format is self-describing, non-proprietary, and platform-independent.