Chapter 10: Web Services

Overview

WEB SERVICES REPRESENT A new philosophy in application development and design. Based on standard protocols, Web services introduce a way of allowing applications to take advantage of Internet communication.

Web services enable applications to take advantage of the Internet by allowing them to make procedural calls and exchange data over the Web. By relying on Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the packaging, Web services allow communications between programs running all over the world, regardless of the underlying platform.

ATL Server has been designed to allow native C++ developers to easily create Web services on the Windows platform. The ATL Server Web service support has been extensively tested against Web services created using other tools and technologies (ASP.NET, Apache, and others) to ensure ease of use and interoperability.

In this chapter you ll examine what exactly Web services are, how they work, and how you can use ATL Server to take advantage of them in your own applications (or to migrate existing components forward). This chapter assumes you are somewhat familiar with XML and XML namespaces.