Selecting the Technologies

For this Web service, we will be referencing an existing COM-based system. To most efficiently interact with this platform, we will build the Web service on a Microsoft Windows 2000 platform. We will also utilize the Microsoft development platform of COM+ for the objects and ASP for the interface middleware. We will also use Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 for maintaining consumer accounts and session data.

Note 

We will not use the .NET framework or development environment for this Web service. While .NET will hide some of the plumbing details we will cover, this exposure will give you a more complete understanding of how Web services work.