Chapter 9. The Building Blocks of Services

Throughout this book I’ve said that web services are based on three fundamental technologies: HTTP, URIs, and XML. But there are also lots of technologies that build on top of these. You can usually save yourself some work and broaden your audience by adopting these extra technologies: perhaps a domain-specific XML vocabulary, or a standard set of rules for exposing resources through HTTP’s uniform interface. In this chapter I’ll show you several technologies that can improve your web services. Some you’re already familiar with and some will probably be new to you, but they’re all interesting and powerful.