Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to move into the mainstream. With IBM Rational XDE Developer v2003 — .NET Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to support you, there really aren’t any excuses left to avoid exploring Web services. Start using them quickly and effectively through hands-on exercises. You’ll be happy to see how easy it is to model and generate .NET XML Web services.
XDE guide for Visual Studio .NET developers
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I can honestly say as a long-time .NET developer, I have yet to find a project (as a consultant) where web services would have been useful to me in any way.
I’ve experimented and become familiar w/ them and at one point *almost* needed them, but found a better solution in the end.
I can’t see web services becoming more than hype (where they’ve sat for 4 years now) in the immediate future.
I can see where they *could* be valuable but the excessive verbosity of SOAP makes me hesitant to use them in an enterprise setting. However, the cool factor is definitely there.
Then again, I could be way off, just speaking from personal experience.
I work at a large entertainment company as a software developer. We have a couple different teams that write software to handle the different parts of our entertainment network; media management, contracts, scheduling, etc. Everything each team does is exposed as a web service. Why? So other teams don’t have to re-invent the wheel to get information. I had to write a schedule loader that interfaces with a third party scheduling tool. I had to get schedule information, I had to get version information, etc. All I had to do was make web service calls to do this. We use .NET on the front end, but use Java/Glue/Hibernate for all Web Service and Database work.
…bloody expensive
I tested once and loved it, but I can’t pay the price they ask, so for me it’s back to Visio…
I just spent 3 days trying to get 3) MS-SOAP machines 1) SOAPpy app and 1) java AXIS app to all communicate using soap. It was a *complete* nightmare, differences in the minor versions of ms dev/dotnet didn’t communicate properly the python app refused to call methods that had more the 1 parameter and ms-soap machines refused to get valid return values from methods on the java/axis machine.
I *like* the idea of soap , but its pretty obvious to me that using soap across different development platforms is not yet a reality another 2-3 years maybe.
-greg
Microsoft’s idea of web services is their Enterprise Services (cunningly called to make it sound the same). Microsoft .Net’s web services support is fairly poor, and in all those training courses people go to they discourage you from using web services. They obviously don’t like the idea of a .Net client communicating directly with a non .Net web services back-end, because they try to give the impression that it isn’t possible.
Web services are a good idea for distributed development, as they’re very simply to get up and running and simple interfaces is the key. Having the portability of HTTP over that god awful DCOM crap is also a plus. However, from Microsoft’s perspective it will only ever be one of those things that they pretend to support.
Mandatory REST is better than SOAP post:
http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl