RE: SOAP applications ?

[Erich Izdepski]

A SOAP or web service application is a distributed application. It makes calls to servers that you either control yourself (such as an interface to a legacy system), that are controlled by your business partners, or that provide a public information service (like zip code services). SOAP is just one way to make these calls. You build an application treating each web service as if it were just a local component. What's nice is that you can also take any information source and put a web service wrapper around it. By exposing this source as web service, you and anyone else has a well-known, cross-platform, high-level way of calling methods to retrieve data from this source-- SOAP.   One simple application that could be built in this manner would be a vacation planner. You could combine weather services, map services, and a seach engine all through web services. Punch in the zip code of where you are and where you are going and voila- out comes a map, the weather report, and some search engine results on what to do once you get there. www.xmethods.com has a weather service (and many other service useful for testing), google has created a web service exposing their search engine, and for a map service you can just wrap yahoo or mapquest in a simple web service wrapper if it hasn't already been done.   Erich Izdepski Senior Software Engineer Cysive, Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Shashi Anand [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 1:09 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SOAP applications ? Hi,   What could be SOAP applications in real world ?   In other words how to decide whether SOAP could be solution to some scenarios.   Thanks Shashi Anand