Chapter 14. Exposing Data Through Web Services

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IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Are Web Services?

• Building Simple Output Web Services

• Building Input/Output Web Services

• Consuming Web Services

• Summary

As the Internet has grown, the need to share data across Web sites, and a variety of backend applications has grown with it. With the variety of Web server platforms, database applications, programming languages, and proprietary data management applications, sharing data has become increasingly difficult. As more applications develop into Web-based solutions, and more companies rely on the Internet as a vessel for data exchange, it becomes obvious that an easy way of enabling this is needed. The solution to enabling Internet-based data exchange is .NET Web services.

Through the development of Internet standards, such as XML, you have the ability to exchange data in a common format with another application, even when the two applications run on different systems, running different applications, written in different languages, using different data storage applications. Much like HTTP provided a standard protocol by which a browser and a Web server could interact, and HTML provided a standard presentation mark-up format for documents, XML provides a standard data exchange format that can be used by a variety of disparate systems.

In this chapter, you will learn how Web services bring the programmable Web to life.

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