Web Service Benefits

With all the effort it takes to learn web services and change your programming paradigm, what is the upside for making the switch? How can you get a return from your web services investment? Web services yield significant benefits for many kinds of applications. We can break these benefits into the categories outlined here.

Platform independence. Web services are platform independent and not intimately tied to proprietary hardware or operating system software. Because they rely on SOAP and SOAP is really just XML, web services can be used on any platform that supports SOAP and can be invoked from any such platform. Finally, the obstacle that has prevented heterogeneous RPC-based systems from interacting has been eliminated.

Ease of integrating disparate systems. This is the key benefit of web services. Integration of a web service that sends and receives SOAP messages is easy to implement and a few orders of magnitude less complex than translating from or into a message format that is specific to a given application or platform.

Reduced security risk. Some forms of application integration carry security risks with them as well. Because web services with SOAP are really just XML, the same port (port 80) typically configured for HTTP can be used. As a result, web services can pass through firewalls without additional ports being opened, thereby significantly reducing the risk of potential security breaches.