C#® Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET

Why Web Services?

The concept of RPC is nothing new. In the preceding years we have been proselytized to use DCOM, CORBA, and a number of other RPC protocols. However, none of these protocols has received enough support to make them ubiquitous and thus enable any trading between partners. DCOM and CORBA both used their own data representations that, while similar in many respects, are different enough to prevent any interoperation. They each define their own protocols that don't work very well in a high-latency WAN such as the Internet. DCOM in particular is very “chatty,” requiring numerous round trips just to negotiate a simple remote procedure call with no arguments. In addition, with the paranoid mentality of corporations connecting to the ...