Chapter 14. Web Services

Normal web pages allow interaction between the client browser and the web server hosting the web page. Many businesses, however, need to provide information not to users, but to other programs.

For example, Amazon.com has a service that allows applications to send in the ISBN of a book and get back information about the publisher, sale price, sales rank, and so forth. This service has no user interface: it is a way for your program to interact with their data. Such a service, providing information with no user interface, using standard web protocols, is called a web service.