What You Are Going to Learn

This book examines all aspects of web services. Web services are still a relatively new concept. As such, the book’s early chapters focus on providing you with hands-on opportunities to interact with real-world web services that exist at sites across the Web. After that, you will learn how to create your own web services and how to make your web services available to other programmers across the Web.

No experience is required—with web services, that is. You’ll learn from the ground up. If you are anxious to get started, go ahead and jump to Chapter 1 right now, and put a few web services you can find on the Web to work. This book, however, doesn’t teach the languages used for creating web services. It assumes that you are an experienced VB.NET and C# programmer who wants to learn to put those skills to work developing web services.

Less than a decade ago, most of us would not have imagined that each day hundreds of millions of users would use their PCs to search worldwide for information, to purchase goods and services, or to work from their homes with access to the files and documents that reside on their office computers. Just as the Web has changed the way users interact with computers, web services provide a similar shift in how programmers might create applications in the future. For example, a programmer who needs the ability to translate text on the fly to a different language may integrate a translation web service into his or her program. Likewise, a programmer who must allow only authorized users to access a remote database that contains sensitive information might use a security web service to quickly implement the authentication.

Just as users search the Web to find information, programmers will use the web service discovery tools, such as the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) protocol, to quickly locate the existing web services that offer a specific solution. This book will help you get ready for the new paradigm.