Chapter 4. Web Services

No reference guide on portals or .NET would be complete without thorough coverage of web services. For many people, web services are the core of what .NET offers, and Microsoft indeed does have ambitious plans for weaving web services into its entire platform. Web services are vital to opening your portal to business and government partners . They can link disparate and otherwise incompatible systems and bridge the chasm between Java and .NET. Web services promise to be the foundation for the next generation of the Internet.

This chapter introduces web services from a few different perspectives. First we look at what the world was like before web services. We look at the trends that require systems integration and data exchange within local applications and even across disparate homogeneous (disparate or homogenous) systems. After that, we review the strengths and weaknesses of current technologies before defining web services and explaining how they address the shortcomings of other technologies.