Creating and Consuming Web Services

“Web Services signal a new era of lightweight distributed application development. While Web Services are not intended nor do they have the power to solve every distributed application problem, they are an easy way to create and consume services over the Internet. One of the design goals for Web Services is to allow companies and developers to share services with other companies in a simple way over the Internet.” Read the lengthy and informative article at ExtremeTech. Another Web Services article, an editorial this time, is hosted at the Open Standards web site. The author has concluded pretty much the same as we did in our .NET editorial, that “Web services is at least a solid beginning to a new era of distributed computing that is as inevitable as paved roads. If web services is not hype, what remains to be questioned are the tools and services the hype masters themselves know you do not have to choose. Will .NET be the answer for everyone? Will Java take the lead through its community involvement and open source support? Will supply and demand for web services skyrocket in the next few months? These are things to be hyped. Will web services and distributed computing change our lives? Now I hear a ring of truth.”