Introducing Web Services

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

This article—Introducing Web Services—is from .NET Web Services, by Keith Ballinger. Copyright © 2003 Pearson Education, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.  Read the book review!

Introducing Web Services

The underlying software and hardware that provide the connective tissue for the Internet represent some of the most complex technology of the past few decades. Just a few years ago, the Internet was a simple network that relatively few people used for e-mail. Seemingly overnight, HTTP- and HTML-based Web pages emerged. HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) is an application-level protocol that is relatively easy to implement and debug. Web pages based on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) are easy to author using a human-readable format that Web browsers have been liberal at interpreting.

Several years after the HTTP/HTML revolution, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) came into play. XML is a simple and easy-to-understand format for data markup. From this single, easy manner of data encoding, it wasn’t too large a step to create a new application framework that combined HTTP and XML into Web service—and enabled developers to create distributed applications in ways that were impossible before. I say that Web services are an exciting technology because the Web architecture is fundamentally different from many other networking and distributed programming methodologies. Web services inherit many of the better features of the Web, as well as some of the pitfalls.

This chapter provides an overview of the features and drawbacks of Web services. It begins with an introduction to Web services, including a working definition, and places them in the larger context of distributed application development. By the end of this chapter, you should have a clearer understanding of what Web services are, as well as how this technology fits into the larger landscape of software development.