Microsoft® Visual J#™ .NET (Core Reference)

Chapter 18. Creating a Web Service Client

In Chapter 17, you learned how to create Web services and we used a Web browser to examine and test them manually. However, the whole point of Web services is that you access them programmatically, not through a Web browser. Web service clients can take many forms and can be written in a variety of languages on different platforms. Ideally, you should not need to be a SOAP expert to invoke a Web service; the mechanism for Web services should fit with the development paradigm of your environment and language.

The Web services examples you’ve seen so far have been used synchronously—that is, you wait for a response before proceeding. However, this is not always the best way of working. If an operation can ...