Sams Teach Yourself Web Services in 24 Hours

Chapter 8. Understanding How Web Services Communicate

Before we can get into the specifics on the internals of Web services, it is important to understand the communication fundamentals upon which they operate. In this hour, we’ll examine the communications mechanisms upon which Web services operate. We’ll examine the following topics:

• TCP/IP and how the Internet works

• HTTP

• Message queues for Web services

• SMTP as a Web service transfer protocol

• FTP

• Jabber for Web services

Although it’s possible to get extremely low level in the discussion of these areas, it’s not really necessary for the level of this book to do so. Instead, we’ll focus more on how these protocols work from the standpoint of Web services.

One key feature of Web services is ...