Web Services
A web service is a method for communication between devices over the Internet. The most common protocol for communication is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) that was designed in 1998. If you’ve worked with SOAP you know that there is nothing simple about it, and a new protocol known as Representational State Transfer (REST) is quickly gaining in popularity.
Web services are important for communications in applications. Many enterprise systems expose web services for consumption by client software like your Windows 8 application. Web services will be covered in Chapter 15, “Networking” due to the rich variety available and the need to better understand the Windows Runtime networking stack.