This new article from DevArticles today talks about one of the hottest topics everyone is looking to use these days - web services.

From Working with Web Services: What's so exciting about Web services is the promise of online registries of services provided by service brokers. Consumers need not know who provides a service, only what service they need. At any given moment, any number of service providers can exist, each providing a service with a different level of cost, reliability, performance, or some other factor. The service consumer chooses at runtime which provider best fits. Consider a Web-based picture printing solution that provides different levels of quality and processing speed. All these services could offer the same interface, yet the end result, the printed picture, could vary widely.

They continue on, getting into more detail what web services are, how they work, what protocols they can use, and what the real purpose behind them should be...