Summary

This chapter has given you a brief introduction to the world of web services. Web services are a way in which functionality can be exposed over the Internet or corporate intranets by using standard HTTP protocols that can be consumed by clients on varying platforms so long as they conform to industry standards.

This chapter showed you how to create web services and how to consume them, as well as gave you information on the plumbing that makes web services work properly: SOAP and WSDL. The next few chapters go into more detail regarding web services and best practices when working with them.