Why web services?

[cm@gowcity]

Im just learning c# and begining to use web services.
Ive built a few and managed to consume theses into asp pages but i am
struggling to see the advantage of these!
Why not just build the functionality into the page?

hopefully this will start a bit of a discussion!

Thanks

Colin

 

[Michael Pearson]

I don't think I'd generally use them in ASP.Net development.
IMHO, where they see the best use is for 3rd parties talking to your system,
or desktop apps that need to get data from a hosted environment.

Michael

 

[Simon Smith]

On 13 Feb 2004 09:58:27 -0800 in article
<[email protected]> in
microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet.webservices ,

Im just learning c# and begining to use web services.
Ive built a few and managed to consume theses into asp pages but i am
struggling to see the advantage of these!
Why not just build the functionality into the page?

If you can indeed build the functionality into the page, then you
probably should do. However, there are at least two reasons I can
think of for using a Web Service:

You may want a bit of code to run in a totally different context and
possibly asynchronously. A Web Service will do that. Given IIS6 it can
also run in a separate process, which gives some protection from
faults in that piece of code.

I use Web Services to transfer data from one machine to another. I do
a lot of integration work (Web Site to a backing Erp system). The Web
Site calls a Web Service within the Erp system's domain and processes
the data there. The Erp System calls a Web Service on the Web Site to
pass data back.

 

[Me]

have you ever done a screen scrape???
A web service is basically a screen scrape but done in such a way that when
you Consume it you can do what ever you want with the data and use any part
or all parts of the data that's coming in in XML

 

[Joe H]

do you recall RDS (Remote Data Service)? which allowed you to call objects
remotely via HTTP or DCOM? web services provide a replacement for this in a
framework that is a lot more supportable, secure, and easy to implement.

 

[Steve Drake]

I tend to use the following layers :

Data - Bus - Bus Façade, I then consume the Bus Facade from ASP.NET (or fat
client) as this is quicker, then to integrate with 3rd party's I consume the
Bus Façade from a webservice, the bus facade is hosted in a .NET remoted
APP.

Web Services is Service orientated architecture, good for other apps talking
to your backend.
Remoting is Object orientated architecture, good for your APPS front end
talking to your apps backend etc.


Just cos you ASP.NET can use the WebService on the same server it does not
mean its the correct thing todo, but I would say building the functionality
into the page is bad, have a look at remoting.


Steve