Conclusion

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Communicating with Web Services in a Nonstandard Way

If you can’t find a Web Services implementation for the platform and/or language you wish to support, you may need to look at writing your own Web Services implementation. This is a large undertaking that involves considering the many standards that Web Services revolve around including HTTP, XML, WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP.

Beyond the standards, you need to consider whether your Web Services will be server-side based or client-side based only. Many implementations of Web Services are simply client-side so that the application can communicate with the outside world. This, however, doesn’t work well when the outside world needs to call your legacy system. This leads to creating something that serves Web Services, but then you also need to consider with what systems your implementation will be compatible.

Another alternative is to communicate with Web Services in a nonstandard way. This means that you use a Get or Post method to the Web Service and capture the results. Then utilize whatever string or XML parsing method you have available to you.