Conclusion

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Overview

XML lies under the hood of Web Service products. It’s present but the programmer rarely works with it directly unless creating a new product in a language that doesn’t already support Web Services. It is often possible to look at the XML a Web Service uses to communicate. Therefore, it’s important for a programmer to understand some basic XML to work with Web Services.

In addition, many of the underlying technologies for Web Services, such as SOAP, use XML. So regardless of how high level a Web Service technology may be, it is useful to know what is going on underneath the hood.

A book on Web Services cannot cover the entire concept of XML in a single chapter, but in this short chapter several of the concepts needed to understand the XML in SOAP, UDDI, and WSL are covered. For a complete introduction, take a look at the actual standard at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at http://www.w3.org/XML/.