Web Services Demystified

What Do I Need To Learn?

At this stage of learning about Web services, I was thinking something along the lines of "UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP... that sure is a lot of stuff to learn to do something that sounds so simple and elegant in theory!", so I don't blame you if you're feeling similarly overwhelmed.

The nice thing about Web services is they are getting a lot of support from the makers of programming tools and Web servers alike. For instance, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has created a product called Apache SOAP that allows you to deploy standard Java programs as Web services. Similarly, Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET provides many tools to easily deploy and write programs that take advantage of Web services.

Apache SOAP handles all the details of converting SOAP requests into Java method calls, and converting the results of those method calls into SOAP responses. It even creates WSDL descriptions of your Web services, and helps you deploy them on any Servlet-enabled Web server such as Tomcat. Apache SOAP also makes it easy to write Java programs that take advantage of Web services by handling all the details of converting Java method calls into SOAP requests and sending them to a Web server by HTTP. The ASF is now working on a follow-up project called AXIS, which makes it even easier to develop, deploy, and use Web services.

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET provides the same kinds of facilities that Apache are developing in AXIS. Visual Studio .NET makes it incredibly easy to create and use Web services, though it is specialized to work with the .NET platform. If you already use Microsoft Internet Information Services, however, Visual Studio .NET provides the ideal platform to develop Web services.

Other Web services toolkits exist for other programming languages, as well. For instance, the SOAP::Lite module lets you easily create Web services in Perl.

Summary

In this article, I took you on a tour of Web services technology. Hopefully I've been successful in my attempt to remove the hype surrounding this up-and-coming type of software product. At the same time, I've given you a few starting points to work from to learn how to develop and use Web services on your platform of choice.

No doubt, Web services are much less sexy and exciting than you expected them to be. As this article revealed, what Web services really come down to is a set of technologies that standardize communication between programs over the Internet. Microsoft has bet the farm on Web services by making them a major component of the .NET platform, and is investing $200 million to promote it. Unless I'm very much mistaken, $200 million can make anything sound sexy.

But just because Web services aren't sexy doesn't mean they're not important, or exciting! The idea that any program, on any platform, written in any language can make use of a vast range of Web services is certainly an exciting one! If the development community embraces Web services as a concept (and at this stage, it's not looking bad!), the Brave New World of software development that blossoms out of it should be quite a thing to behold.

In future articles, I'll show you how to develop and use Web services as part of your own software projects. That's when things will really start to get exciting!