Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework

Using the Tax Web Service

For MyGolfGear.NET, we implemented our tax calculations as a Web service. You can find a brief overview of SOAP and Web services in Chapter 2, “.NET Overview.”

Note

For more specifics on this concept, read Robert Tabor's book, Microsoft .NET Web Services (ISBN: 0-672-32088-6).

We had to consider several pros and cons when deciding between creating a tax component or a Tax Web service. The reasons we chose to create a Web service are simple yet very powerful. Using a Web service allowed us to separate all the tax processing from the rest of our site. Even though MyGolfGear.NET's tax implementation is simple today, this may not be the case in two months or two years from now. If we see that the tax laws are changing and ...