The Foundations of Web Services: From Novice to Expert
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A web service is a way to make applications inter-operate across different programming languages, platforms and operating systems in order to share the data quickly and efficiently. In this series of articles, I will take you through the basic to advanced concepts for this subject. We will work together on technical aspects of web services for building, deploying, finding and debugging web services.
Distributed technologies and prior generation components and pitfalls
The world is flat, as far as technological concerns go. The evolution of computers and their applications have give us quick accessibility to data. In particular, web technologies are now trying to reach new horizons with newer techniques to meet next generation demands.
There was an era of desktop applications, followed by web-based applications, then distributed applications and today it's all about web services and mobile technology!
Professionals were very excited when they started to implement distributed architectures. There are technologies like:
COM (Component Object Model),
DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model),
CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture),
IIOP (Internet Inter - ORB Protocol),
RMI (Remote Method Invocation) etc.
available to meet the requirements of distributed applications, however as time passed, professionals came across critical technical issues which lead to complexities and have exposed limitations.
The key limitation of such technologies is that they do not inter-operate on the Internet. In fact, DCOM or CORBA are not lightweight and are platform specific, so they cannot run easily on the Internet.
All such real-world problems lead to the requirement to build a lightweight, platform independent distributed architecture, which can work on the Internet by following generalized standards.
Next: Understanding web services >>
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