28.1. Introduction

This chapter introduces web services, which promote software portability and reusability in applications that operate over the Internet. A web service is a software component stored on one computer that can be accessed via method calls by an application (or other software component) on another computer over a network. Web services communicate using such technologies as XML and HTTP. Several Java APIs facilitate web services. In this chapter, we’ll be dealing with APIs that are based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)—an XML-based protocol that allows web services and clients to communicate, even if the client and the web service are written in different languages. There are other web services technologies, such as ...

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