Beginning InfoPath™ 2003

3.4. Introduction to Web Services

You have read thus far in this chapter about two ways of using data with Access: databases and XML documents. The third way is to connect to a Web service. Web services, also called XML Web services, provide the ability to expose your information in a controlled manner to any number of clients over the Internet or an intranet.

3.4.1. Web Services Overview

Web services act as wrappers around your data, allowing you to provide it to users using methods and properties that you want to specify.

Web services are based on SOAP (Simple Object Application Protocol). As with a lot of other new Web development environments, there are tools that generate the SOAP for you so you just have to use common development languages such as ASP.NET, C#, and Visual Basic .NET. Creating your own Web service is discussed in Chapter 15.

Even better news is that you don't even have to use these tools to connect to Web services. An example of a Web service is one that provides the current weather information for whatever airport code you submit to the Web service. You can see the Web site for this Web service in Figure 3-9.

So if the Airport Weather Web service method getSummary() is called with SEATAC as a parameter, it will return the weather for Seattle Tacoma International Airport.

You can use Web services to both retrieve and update information, depending on how the methods of the Web services are set up. There are a number of ways to invoke a Web service, using various ...