Summary
In this chapter, we took a brief tour of distributed computing and saw how web services are a natural successor to technologies such as CORBA and DCOM. In a nutshell, software services that are language, platform, and location independent are destined to inherit the earth.
We also covered SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, the standards that form the technical underpinning of web services, and discussed the challenges that lie ahead for the mass adoption of the technology.
In the next chapter, I'll show you how to build your own web services and invoke them across the Internet. I'll also show you how to manage and invoke web services from your web browser.