Question

What are Web services, and how can they benefit my clients?

Systems Channel, Channel, Web services (software), VAR, Consulting

Our expert on SearchSystemsChannel.com says the advantages of Web services are that they're "platform independent (your customers can essentially run any OS), secure and scalable. They're also Web-based, so they run over Port 80, which many firewalls do not block."

Are you a fan of Web services? How is your company using them? Are they the Next Big Thing for the channel?

This is correct. I'm definately a fan of web services! My current company doesn't use them, but a previous one did.

Basically, I believe when people talk about web services they are talking about Microsoft's implementation of SOAP. Essentially what a web service does is takes input from an application on a client machine and processes it somehow to return an output back to the client.

Basically, the exciting thing about this is that the client doesn't have to be a windows machine at all. A previous company used a web service wrapper around a sales tax caluclation COM object that allowed their AS/400 to make calls to the webservcie to calculate tax-- thereby getting rid of a subscription on the 400 and saving money.

Webservices can be used in .net applications as well as a form of distributed computing or as a security mechanism when someone needs access to the data but you don't want to give them access to the data. Essentially, it is Webified DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model)!