Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15. Creating Web Services

The World Wide Web has opened up distributed computing on a large scale. However, normal web pages allow for interaction only between a client browser and the web server hosting the web page.

The goal of web services is to create web-based applications that interact with other applications with no user interface. If you’re a web page developer, having such web services available can greatly increase your productivity. Imagine, for instance, you are creating a web site for a stock brokerage firm. Rather than integrating your back-end database with all the databases of the different stock exchanges, your application can communicate with their web services, exchanging data in XML format.

Web services are loosely coupled and are entirely independent of the operating system or programming language used on either the server or the client side. Unlike previous technologies for distributed computing (such as DCOM or CORBA), web services do not require that both ends of the connection be programmed in the same language or even be running on the same operating system. For example, the server code might be written in Visual Basic 2005 on Windows XP while the client is written in C++ running on a Unix machine.

If you own both ends of the wire (you are building both the client and the server), web services may not be the best solution. You will get better performance by using .NET remoting, a tightly coupled, proprietary format that sends binary data rather than ...