Mike,

I've already downloaded the SOAP stuff and placed it on the pile of other "cool technology I really need to learn, yearn after and ache after but can't seem to find the time to get to". <g>

Anyway, from what you're saying doesn't my analogy still hold up, that there has been a separation of content (ie. data) and presentation (ie.ui)? No matter what the transport mechanism is (I thought XML but you're saying it's more than that - SDL) wouldn't this be a good way of conceptualizing this?

I like your analogy of Web Services being like a COM server a lot. I was just trying to extend that into the ui & business logic pieces....

Thanks a bunch!

Best,

DD


>>Web Services extends the concept of the separation of data from user interface to the Internet. Now, instead of web servers providing both content and formating with Web Services the web server may provide only content, in a universal format (XML) thus allowing the recipient of this data to format it as they please.
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>>Kind of a thin client form web content?
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>Mmm, almost. The way I prefer to think of it is a COM server (which it could be, but doesn't have to be) with a universally agreed upon protocol (SOAP). IOW, the "typelib" is a package in a Standard Data Language (SDL, which is really just XML; BTW, I'm probably wrong on what SDL stands for, but it's close enough). So, your client goes and asks the server, "what do you offer?" The server responds with a SDL package. The SDL is just like a typelib (only it's in XML) in that it gives you a list of all methods, data types of the parameters those methods take, and what the data type of return value is.
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>So, the "content" is not necessarily in XML; in fact, it probably isn't in XML. Take the stock quote example. What you get back from the server is going to be a regular, everyday decimal return value. You feed it a string containing a stock symbol, and you get back a stock price; no XML is involved (except for the SDL package). You might get a string of XML back, but not necessarily. But, you're right in that the client can format it however they please.
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>Check out the VS SOAP Toolkit to which I referred Jim, the docs should make this Web Services thing much clearer.