Why Web Service

Web Services give you tons of advantages over building the same functionality directly into your app. First off, if you're going to deploy your app to many different places, you have the advantage of centralized management of the logic. If you make a change in the Web Service that is called by your app, the change is immediate and no re-deployment or update by the user is needed. Second, Web Services can be consumed by an endless number of client platforms. I'm currenlty building a .Net Web Service that will be accessed by one of our vendors Java apps. We are able to speak a common language that makes that type of integration nearly seamless. Third, the advantage I see over using .Net Remoting is that Web Services are inherintly network-friendly, as they use HTTP over standard port 80, so there is no need to worry about whether an ISP, or even a router for that matter, is blocking a port that your app needs. The more you get into these, the more I think you will see their value.

Wiz, your reply doesn't sound like a newbie's one :)

well... i'm a newbie, like you, but i understand some of the advantages of Web Services. Maybe the most important one is that they allow interoperability between applications. They're built on existing Internet standards such as XML and HTTP. As a result, any system capable of parsing text and communicating via a standard Internet transport protocol can communicate with a Web service, regardless of the platform, operating system, etc. You can use the functionality of a Web Service from a various number of applications, and you don;t have to re-write the same code in every app that uses those functions.