Sams Teach Yourself Web Services in 24 Hours

Chapter 5. Typical Web Services Designs

When a nonprogrammer asks for a quick description of how Web services are different from other distributed technologies, he normally hears a moment of silence while the programmer tries to figure out how to describe it in nontechnical terms.

In truth, many of the words that we use to describe Web services also describe other distributed computing technologies. Throughout this book, we have attempted to describe Web services directly, and through analogies. We realize, however, that sometimes a few examples are worth more than a ream of written description. This is why we have chosen to spend this hour providing examples of real-world systems. Because Web services implementations are still not yet common ...