Chapter 3. Web Services Technologies

Web services offer many valuable benefits. They support heterogeneous application integration at a fraction of the cost of other methods. They are simpler to build and easier to maintain than traditional middleware, and they can make your IT systems more flexible and adaptable. They also allow you to reuse application functionality, reducing development and administration costs.

Web services derive these benefits from their underlying Web technologies and standards. In particular, they derive these benefits from the Web, XML, and the SOA. In this chapter we will dig into these technologies and examine why they produce these benefits.

First let's get a bit more specific with our definition: A Web service is ...

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