Web Services

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web (internet). In this article, we have tried to keep a realistic, pragmatic, and balanced approach in determining the return on investment on Web Services. It is worth mentioning that, no matter how promising a new technology is, promoting and encouraging its usage through such articles and papers is not justified until there is a solid business case for its adoption. It is fundamentally important for us to warn about the pitfalls as and where we foresee them, leaving the final decision up to the readers who range from senior management (technical and business), through business analysts, and systems architects, to project managers, and software developers.

Web Services make up a connection technology. It is a way to connect services together into a service-oriented architecture. Primary elements of Web Services are:

 Repository
 Messaging
 Service

To technology purists, the Internet was about open standards, connectivity, interoperability, peer-to-peer, and, inevitably, distributed computing. While each of these arrows has threatened to chip away at Microsoft’s proprietary closed Windows platform, none has promised to devalue the individual machine, Microsoft’s pinnacle of success, more than distributed computing.

Web services have been put into practical use for many years. In this time, developers and architects have encountered a number of recurring design challenges related to their usage. We have also learned that certain design approaches work better than others to solve certain problems. This book is for software developers and architects who are currently using web services or are thinking about using them. The goal is to acquaint you with some of the most common and fundamental web service design solutions and to help you determine when to use them. All of the concepts discussed here are derived from real-life lessons. Proven design solutions will also be demonstrated through code examples.

The two types of web references are static and dynamic. Static web references are “hardcoded” with the URL of the web service used when the reference was added. Dynamic web references use the original URL of the web service as a default, but allow the developer or administrator to override that URL through config files or code. The dynamic web reference is often used to facilitate the multiple “levels” of servers found in many organizations (development, stage, and production). Originally the dynamic reference is setup to a development or stage version of the web service while the ASP.Net site is being developed. Once the site is moved to production it needs to point to a production version of the web service.