Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers

1.3. What Are Web Services?

There are at least two answers to the question “What are Web services?” On the surface, a Web service is simply an application that exposes a Web-accessible API. That means you can invoke this application programmatically over the Web. Applications invoking this Web service are referred to as clients. For example, if you wanted to build a Web service that returns current weather information, you could build an ASP page that accepts a zip code in the query string and returns a comma-delimited string containing the current temperature and weather condition. To invoke this ASP page, the client sends an HTTP GET request with a URL that looks like this:

http://host.company.com/weather.asp?zipcode=20171

and the returned ...