21. XML and Web Services

ONCE upon a time, not so long ago, Web services were going to be the next big thing. Web services referred to specific methods of making Web server functionality available to other applications, and everyone fully expected an interoperable nirvana of communicating systems. The air was pungent with the smell of unwieldy acronyms like WS-I, XML-RPC, WSDL, and UDDI, and everyone had to make sure that their products and technologies were going to work with the coming wave of Web services. Collectively, this approach is known as WS-*, and it is more about a distributed computing scheme (think CORBA or DCOM) than anything specific to the World Wide Web.

Web services did turn out to be one of the next big things. As usual, things ...

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