Uses for Web Services

At the beginning of this chapter, we briefly mentioned several areas where Web Services can have an impact on the solutions that you build. Let's look at a few of these areas a little closer.

Business-to-Business

One area that clearly deserves attention is in the business-to-business (B2B) paradigm. Most companies today still operate on paper systems. This is due in part to the simplicity and low cost of entry into paper-based systems. For more than two decades, developers have been trying to integrate business processes using a combination of software and communication protocols.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the technology of choice for many years. Unfortunately, EDI has been a technology that only large corporations ...

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