Web Services Explained, Solutions and Applications for the Real World
Web services are not a new concept. Architectures designed to enable cross-platform program-to-program communications have been around for decades.
Because the industry has agreed on how to present/format data such that it can be interpreted and manipulated and on how to communicate that data (using the Internet) two of the biggest obstacles to cross-platform program-to-program communications have now been overcome.
Vendor commitment from all of the industry's leading suppliers of hardware and software ensures that Web services will, this time, become the accepted standard way for diverse applications to communicate across disparate platforms.
Chapter 1 described Web services as a type of program-to-program communications. It showed how newly evolving standards are being created to enable applications to be published, found, and bound in a manner that makes it possible to share information across diverse and disparate systems/application platforms. It also presented a much larger picture of Web services as part of an overall architecture that can lead to easier application development, work/business flow efficiencies, improved application support for mobile users, and much, much more.
This chapter takes a closer look at program-to-program communications. It describes how this type of communications works. It then describes various program-to-program communications architectures and some of their respective strengths and weaknesses. It concludes with reasons that Web services will overcome the pitfalls experienced by previous architectures and become the method of choice for program-to-program communications.