Summary

This chapter introduced Web serviceswhat they are, how they work, and what use they may be in enabling interoperability in applications or systems. Web services are an excellent approach to request/response interactions where state isn't maintained and due to their abstract, platform-independent nature are designed to facilitate cross platform execution. However, they suffer from some interoperability challenges due to different approaches to implementing the standards. In addition the chapter walked through an example of building a Web service using Java and how to consume it using .NET, and vice-versa.

Finally a number of best practices to ensure clean interoperability between Java and .NET-based Web services were presented, along with potential pitfalls that the developer or architect could face when using them.