Chapter 13. Web Services

The term web service refers to a web-accessible application that performs some action based on a request from a client. For these entities to communicate, an agreed upon language, or communication protocol, must be used. The first web services used the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is an XML-based messaging protocol. Although SOAP is effective, it is often perceived as being a heavy-weight and difficult to use.

The Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture, created by Roy Fielding in 2000, is a specification for building web services that is much simpler than SOAP. Both concepts have their pros and cons, but REST is emerging as the more popular of the two—as evidenced by its adoption by Yahoo, Facebook, ...

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