What do the iNet control, XMLHTTP and web services have in common? They all use HTTP tunneling. In this 3 part series, Adnan gets under the hood and shows us exactly what HTTP tunneling is.
"The Internet is not just about making websites! It's about the streamlining of business solutions and synergy to provide a seamless enterprise information exchange."
Sharing information is in the basics of the enterprise networking architecture, from the legacy of WinInet to the current range of web services -- which xmethods is getting overwhelmed with -- it's the sequel of empowering communication protocols. In this article I will explain this saga of information exchange progression, exemplifying through code and revealing the distributed EDI in detail.
This article in separated into 2 parts, and explains the technological evolution of Web Services; therefore I find it a necessity to explain the underlying technologies. It's a tale of a long journey from the Windows Internet Controls to WebClients in ASP.NET. It explains the evolution of SOAP and Web Services, with definitions and examples.
First, I'll demonstrate the URI information exchange process without third party tools i.e. through archaic Inetctls -- reading amazon.com's book reviews with ISBN's in a query string. Later its modified form -- XMLHTTP and ServerXMLHTTP -- will be discussed as more effective tunneling tools.
Third party components available in the market like ASPTear, ASPHTTP, DynuHttp and OCXHttp and their implementations are the next topic of enlightenment. Later, we will move towards more sophisticated implementations with examples including .NET Webclients and Soap Envelopes, implementing a webservice from Xmethods.
I tried my best to be practical and to-the-point, and all examples provided in this article are .aspx files developed with the .NET Framework with SP-2. The diversity of examples will hopefully keep readers interest high.
ASP 
HTTP Tunneling Revealed: Part 2/3
