6.8 Summary

In this chapter, we've introduced you to the new paradigm of applications—the enterprise application. You are no longer restricted to homogeneous platforms for implementing your solutions. With Microsoft web services, your solutions can span many different platforms because the communication between web services is done through standard Internet protocols such as HTTP and XML. The distributed components in Windows DNA with which you may be familiar are now replaced by web services. Using web services as components in a distributed environment allows for a heterogeneous system. The web services in your system can not only be implemented in different languages, but can even be on different platforms. Because of this greater interoperability, web services are eminently suitable for B2B integration.