As we saw in our web services examples in Chapters 14 and 15, one of the most interesting uses for XML is web services. A web service is simply an application service supplied over the network, making use of XML to describe the request and response. Normally, web services run over HTTP and use an XML-based protocol called Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a W3C standard. The combination of XML and HTTP provides a widely accessible interface for services.
SOAP and other XML-based remote procedure call mechanisms can be used in place of Java RMI for cross-platform communications. Web services are widely used and it is likely that they will continue to grow in importance in coming years. To learn more about Java APIs related to web services, check out the networking chapters of this book and take a look at http://java.sun.com/webservices/.
That’s it for our brief introduction to XML. There is a lot more to learn about this exciting area, and many of the APIs are evolving rapidly. We hope we’ve given you a good start.
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